Kobo: Successful Holiday Season?
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With all the talks about how Kindle and iPad are dominating the e-reader market, it may be easy to forget about other players involved in this business. Kobo is not exactly competitive against Amazon, but it has had a successful holiday season nonetheless. At least that is what the company claims at this point:
Earlier this month we predicted that Christmas would be a record breaker for Kobo, and we have exceeded our expectations driving several ebook downloads per second since Christmas Eve. I would like to thank our customers for choosing Kobo to start building their digital library this Christmas. Our success this holiday season is a pre-cursor to a New Year with people reading more than ever thanks to ebooks and Kobo,
said Kobo’s Michael Serbinis. Apparently, Kobo has had a significant amount of success with e-book downloads with hundreds of thousands of Kobo devices being activated since Christmas. Some of these claims are quite vague. One could argue they are as vague as Amazon’s claims (considering that Amazon has never given us a solid number on Kindle sales):
- registered users nearly doubling from the six weeks prior
- 50x more purchases in comparison to the previous Holiday weekend 2009
- A 5X increase in purchases from the previous biggest weekend
The company also claims that e-readers and tablets are mostly responsible for its e-book success. Unfortunately for Kobo, consumers are not exactly excited about Kobo eReader, considering that Kindle almost costs the same and is a much faster, more polished device. Can Kobo eReader survive? You be the judge.
