The great British novelist C.S. Lewis once said, “We read to know we are not alone,” but even the man who dreamed up the fantastic realms of Narnia could never have imagined the brave new social world Kobo Inc. is about to usher in for book lovers.
For many, reading is the last untouched bastion of personal media consumption, perhaps the purest of all individual intellectual pursuits. One which has been associated with quiet, solitude and individual reflection.
Sure, people talk to their friends about what books they’re reading, but not usually during the actual reading Thanks to Kobo, that could all be about to change.
On Thursday, the Toronto-based e-publishing startup will launch Reading Life, a new e-reading iPad application that integrates with the company’s digital bookstore designed to bring social-networking capabilities to the world of electronic books, in a sort of Book Club 2.0.
Through the opt-in service, Kobo users will be able to directly share with their friends what books they're reading and share favourite passages through Facebook, keep tabs on their reading history through a comprehensive statistics tracker and earn badges and rewards for reading in a manner reminiscent of social check in services like Foursquare and Gowalla.
But Reading Life is about more than simply enabling readers to tell their friends when they've encountered Alice for the first time in a Lewis Carroll book or letting them earn a badge for checking into Wonderland.
Kobo sees Reading Life as the beginning of a new era for the company and for e-reading, one where adding elements of community to the reading experience not only helps Kobo differentiate itself from rival e-book offerings from Amazon.com Inc., Google Inc. and Apple Inc., but potentially opens the door to new partnerships and marketing opportunities to entice book lovers and create fresh revenue streams. "This is the beginning of a major thrust for us, where we're making e-reading social," Kobo chief executive Michael Serbinis said in an interview.
"The most important part that we believe customers are looking for in the overall experience is the cultural part of reading. The cultural part of reading is social, it's fun and it's what makes content meaningful."
Kobo plans to roll the Reading Life application out to iPad users first, with versions designed for tablets -- including Research In Motion Ltd.'s forthcoming PlayBook -- and all manner of smartphones coming next year.
With Reading Life, users can tell their friends what books they're reading and share that information through Facebook. Mr. Serbinis said the company plans to add other social-networking services, such as Twitter, in future releases.
As well, Reading Life tracks not only what a user is reading, but what time of day they're reading and, using the location-based technology of the iPad, can even tell where in the world the user is when they're reading.
Like the popular location-based service Foursquare, Mr. Serbinis said Kobo's strategy involves offering users badges and rewards for checking in and reading from certain locations. A reader who checks in from a location in Prince Edward Island, for example, could be offered a discount on Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery.
Mr. Serbinis said the company plans to launch its rewards program over the holiday season with Kobospecific offers, such as discounted books, but said he hopes to encourage other companies -- for example, coffee chains -- to partner with Kobo on the rewards program in the future.
While some readers still get their book recommendations from newspaper reviews or Oprah's Book Club, increasingly book lovers are turning to their friends and social media contacts for recommendations, said Sidney Matrix, a media professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont.
"It's a logical extension of some of these earlier trends, such as social reading," she said. "What's new about it is the e-commerce is being socialized , so this is going to be the next generation of social shopping for e-books."
Adding elements of video games, such as badges and rewards, is one way to help encourage people to read more and talk about what they're reading, she said.
"Books were always mobile technology," she said.
For Kobo, Reading Life comes at a critical time for the company with the holidays on the horizon and its competitors ramping up efforts to grab a greater share of the exploding market for electronic books -- earlier this week, Google announced the launch of its own digital bookstore -- an industry that some analysts believe could account for as much as 50% of publishing revenue in the United States by 2014.
from: Financial Post
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