We’re happy to share some exciting news for Kobo and KWL as we kick off 2018!
As announced in Tokyo yesterday, Rakuten Kobo and Walmart are entering a strategic alliance, making Walmart the exclusive mass retail partner of the Kobo brand in the US.
It’s Walmart’s first foray into digital books, offering our catalogue of nearly six million eBooks with audiobooks following later in the year. Digital content will be accessible through a Walmart/Kobo co-branded app on all iOS and Android devices, a desktop app and Kobo e-Readers, which will also be sold by Walmart starting as early as this spring.
This represents a significant expansion of our reach in the US market. We look forward to working with you to develop unique offerings to serve the Walmart customer; this will require our combined creativity to build a differentiated offering. We believe this represents a great opportunity for increased competition in the US eBook market, which is a great benefit to readers.
The Kobo Writing Life Team is looking forward to continuing to work with you and we believe this partnership will help us serve and encourage even more booklovers to read more of what they want, in whichever format they choose.
All our best,
The Kobo Writing Life Team
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Guess that leaves out ebooks on Kindle.
If they have an app for Android or iOS, what difference does it make? You can get the books from Kobo on a Fire, phone, or tablet. I have several Kindles, but I have also bought books from Google Play.
Two questions that I hope will be addressed either on the blog or via the KWL emails.
First, for clarity, all independent authors and small presses publishing via kobowritinglife are being distributed?
Second, how will this affect the erotic romance and erotica titles published via KWL? Walmart currently requires musicians to self-censor their music for inclusion in the store (but not movies and I’ve no idea re the print books they sell in the stores). So, being a boundless optimist, I am basically waiting for another WH Smith debacle all over again.
Best regards
We will absolutely be updating our authors as the details of the partnership are worked out – watch this space!