BookExpo America is upon us, and all the talk at the New York publishing fair is of booming e-book sales and where that leaves hardbacks and paperbacks.
Barnes & Noble, the bookstore chain whose digital prospects helped encourage John Malone to make a $1bn offer last week, is marking the occasion by unveiling a new model of its Nook e-reader on Tuesday morning. Kobo got in a day early with the launch of a new touch-screen version of its 6-inch e-ink reader on Monday.
As Amazon brings the price of its market-leading Kindle down, the iPad makes Apple a competitor in e-books and Sony struggles to break through, what hope is there for smaller competitors to such giants? “It’s certainly David versus many Goliaths,” admits Michael Serbinis, Kobo’s chief executive.
“But even Amazon was once a David. They viewed Barnes & Noble as a Goliath”
Amazon’s 60-plus per cent share of the US e-book market is well known, but so far, Apple has looked less threatening. Mr Serbinis echoes publishers in estimating that Apple’s iBookstore has only about 10 per cent of the market, roughly half the Nook’s share. Non-US markets are still more up for grabs.
Kobo, which sells through retailers such as Walmart, Best Buy and the ill-fated Borders, also claims a 10 per cent share of the US market, but Mr Serbinis states that it aims to be number one in a $90bn global book business that is going digital.
That looks bold, to put it mildly, but Kobo’s strategy is to be competitively priced (the new Kobo eReader Touch Edition is $130, and the old wi-fi model drops to $100); to reach less digitally-savvy book buyers as the exclusive partner of bookstores from Indigo in Canada to WH Smith in the UK; and to offer its software widely to tablet and smartphone makers such as RIM in need of a book app (even on the iPad, its latest app was downloaded 1m times last week).
Whether the Kobo, with its quilted back, will beat the Kindle remains to be seen. But Mr Serbinis says he has no ambition to take on Apple by creating a multi-function tablet. “It’s immersive – you don’t have Skype and other messages going off in the background – and now e-readers are going to a younger group of kids, parents don’t want their kids spending all their time playing games,” he says. “We stand for reading in an age of 200m Angry Birds downloads.”
