Kobo Unveils New Ereading Lineup

Kobo Unveils New Ereading Lineup, Taking Readers Beyond the Book

Kobo Arc 10HD, Kobo Arc 7HD and Kobo Arc 7 tablets and the Kobo Aura 6” E Ink eReader, put reading first with enhanced Reading Life platform

AUCKLAND, New Zealand, August 28, 2013 – Kobo, a global leader in eReading, today announced its new lineup of eReading devices, featuring the new Kobo Aura 6” E Ink eReader, the Google-certified Kobo Arc 10HD and two Kobo Arc 7 tablets. Designed for Readers, the new lineup is built on Kobo’s unique user experience, Reading Life, enabling the collection, curation and discovery of content, delivering on the company’s promise to put reading first.

“Kobo remains focused on Reading; a time-honoured passion that keeps people informed, lets them escape, learn about new cultures, see things from a new perspective, travel back in time, and imagine new worlds,” said Michael Serbinis, CEO, Kobo. “With magazines joining our eBookstore, a new kids experience, and the best eReading devices possible, we will help Readers find more of what they love – taking them beyond the book.”

To best showcase the company’s world-class bookstore with 4-million titles, which now includes magazines and a dedicated Kids Store, the NVIDIA®-powered Kobo Arc 10HD and Kobo Arc 7HD tablets offer beautiful and responsive high definition displays and uncompromised access to Android™ 4.2.2 Jelly Bean and the Google Play™ Store. With Reading Life, Kobo’s reading-first user experience, Readers can discover more of the content they’re interested in with new ways to organise and curate collections of eBooks, magazines and other multimedia content from across the Web including movies, music and games. Kobo’s new Reading Mode feature eliminates distracting notifications and pop-ups from email, apps and social media, optimizes the lighting settings, and extends the tablet battery life from hours to days.

For Readers who prefer a dedicated reading experience, Kobo has created the beautiful Kobo Aura 6” E Ink eReader, which boasts a stunning edge-to-edge, high-resolution (212 dpi) display. The Kobo Aura leverages a new low-flash screen technology to virtually eliminate ghosting and page refresh for the best book-like reading experience, and holds up to 3,000 books and lasts more than two months on a single charge. Plus, for the first time ever, Readers can now send articles and webpages to read on their E Ink devices through the company’s partnership with Pocket.

Across its new lineup of eReading tablets and E Ink eReaders, Kobo is helping Readers discover more of the content they’re interested in with the company’s all-new Beyond the Book experience, which highlights key topics within a book and provides aggregated content from across the Web known as Collections. To share Kobo’s own passion for discovering great reading materials, Featured Collections are personalised with Kobo’s own editorial voice as well as respected influencers including authors, publishers, and other notable people who are experts in their field.

UNITING BEAUTIFUL DESIGN AND IMMERSIVE READING – COMING SEPTEMBER 16

KOBO AURA

Hot on the heels of the limited-edition Kobo Aura HD, the new 6” Kobo Aura eReader is a beautifully designed, front-lit E Ink eReader. Available in black and pink, the Kobo Aura features a high-resolution, edge-to-edge display and the most even front-lit ComfortLight technology, wrapped in a contemporary aesthetic to keep people passionate about reading books – day or night.

The sophisticated design of the eReader delivers the closest experience to print-on-paper with a 212 dpi and Pearl E Ink screen. With pinch-and-zoom capabilities for FLePubs/PDFs, Kobo Aura creates a great print-on-paper reading experience with a low-flash waveform screen to virtually eliminate page refresh and ghosting. Readers will never be at a loss for compelling reads with access to 4-million titles, curated Collections from Kobo, and the new Pocket partnership. With 4GB of storage (up to 3,000 books), expandable up to 32GB with a microSD card, Kobo Aura has a battery life of up to two months, making it perfect for passionate Readers. The Kobo Aura retails for NZD $249.00 (RRP) and is available in New Zealand for pre-order at www.kobo.com.

THE BEST HIGH-DEFINITION TABLETS FOR READERS – COMING OCTOBER 16

KOBO ARC 10HD

Kobo Arc 10HD celebrates reading with Kobo’s Reading Life platform, a compelling reading dashboard that is part of the user interface, with full access to the content people love to consume including books, magazines, news, and social media. With an NVIDIA® Tegra® 4 1.8GHz quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM, the Kobo Arc 10HD tablet is the best 10-inch HD Google-certified multimedia tablet on the market today for Readers. The Kobo Arc 10HD tablet boasts a stunning 2560x1600 high-definition display with up to 1080p video playback, making it the perfect companion to enjoy the rich content from Kobo’s bookstore like magazines, as well as the 1-million+ games and apps from the Google Play Store. The Kobo Arc 10HD tablet also includes a front-facing 1.3 MP HD camera, dual stereo speakers, WiFi 802.11, Bluetooth 4.0, and Miracast connectivity support for Wi Fi media streaming. With Reading Mode, the battery life is extended from 9.5 hours to more than 10 days. Available in black, the Kobo Arc 10HD retails for NZD$599.00 (RRP).

KOBO ARC 7” TABLETS

The Kobo Arc 7HD tablet leverages the beautifully designed Reading Life platform that makes collecting, curating, and discovering content easier for Readers.

The Kobo Arc 7HD tablet is powered by the NVIDIA® Tegra® 3 1.7GHz quad-core processor and 1920x1200 display with up to 1080p video playback delivering a crisp, seamless viewing experience. The HD tablet has a 1GB of RAM, a front-facing 1.3 MP HD camera, and a battery that lasts up to 8 hours so readers are never at a loss for words. Available in black, the Kobo Arc 7HD retails for NZD$349.00 (RRP) with 16GB and NZD$399.00 (RRP)with 32GB.

For those Readers new to tablets, Kobo is offering the Kobo Arc 7, perfect for first-time users and families. With a 1024X600 display, MTK 8125 1.2GHz quad-core processor and 1GB of RAM, the Kobo Arc 7 offers Readers a compact, multimedia tablet for reading and entertainment on the go. The Kobo Arc 7 retails for NZD$249.00 (RRP) with 8GB.

ABOUT READING LIFE

Kobo puts reading first and then takes you Beyond the Book with its enhanced Reading Life platform. Kobo’s exclusive Reading Life user experience gives Readers access to all the content they love to consume, and allows them to customize based on their reading habits. On the new Kobo Arc series of tablets, the home screen showcases Readers’ recent activity and personalised recommendations. A swipe to the left takes Readers into an uncompromised Android experience including access to the full Google Play Store. To the right of the home screen, Readers discover a personalised bookshelf where they can collect and organise eBooks, magazines, and other multimedia. To maximise the tablet experience for Readers, Kobo’s Reading Mode provides settings to help eliminate distracting notifications from email and apps, adjust the lighting settings, and enhance battery life from hours to days.

On Kobo’s new tablets and E Ink eReaders, Beyond the Book offers a way for passionate Readers to discover and engage with content by discovering books, Collections, and online material related to their latest reads and areas of interests. While reading a book, Readers can turn on this feature to discover content that is related to key subjects within the book. With Collections, Kobo opens the door to more reading material from across the web that is collected into themes like an author, genre, or topic of interest. Partnering with Pocket, the Read It Later feature allows Readers to save articles and other content from the Web, and seamlessly access it in the “Articles” section of their Kobo libraries. Reading Life also offers:

• The option of 11 fonts (including Dyslexie, designed for dyslexic Readers), and 24 font sizes

• Ability to take notes, highlight text, and make bookmarks

• Track reading with fun stats and awards, letting readers learn more about their reading habits

• Share favourite passages, quotes and books to Facebook Timeline

For more information, please visit www.kobo.com

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KOBO EXPANDS WITH DEDICATED KIDS STORE AND GROUNDBREAKING MAGAZINE EXPERIENCE

Coming this summer, popular glossy mags go digital with Kobo’s innovative Guided Reading experience, company offers more titles and dedicated accounts for kids and teens

AUCKLAND, New Zealand 28, 2013 – Kobo, a global leader in eReading, announced today that it will bring the world’s most popular fashion, science, business, and technology magazines to its Readers along with a new dedicated Kids store with safe-search features and accounts for kids this summer. The company has signed top international magazine publishers including Condé Nast, Hearst Corporation, American Media, Mansueto, Bauer Publishing Group, Mondadori, Rogers Publishing Limited, and Reader’s Digest, showcasing their top titles using Kobo’s new Guided Reading experience. New Zealand-based magazine publishers will be announced soon, with rollout expected in the near future.

The company has also expanded its children’s selection with titles like Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, The Day Crayons Quit, Wonder, and Catching Fire to almost 100,000, giving kids and parents more choice, convenience, and value. Kobo’s magazine and kids experiences are available in North America starting in September via its free eReading apps for iOS and Android, and will be available internationally by end of year. The company’s new Kobo Arc lineup of tablets hitting stores this October.

“The same passionate readers who have chosen Kobo for their fiction and non-fiction want Kobo for more parts of their Reading Life,” said Michael Tamblyn, Chief Content Officer, Kobo. “They want magazines that preserve the visual richness found in paper. They want a store that guides them to new great books for their kids – and so do we. We are launching what we believe is the best digital magazine experience to be found anywhere as well as launching a store at Kobo.com focused entirely on children’s books.”

VISUALLY STUNNING MAGAZINE CONTENT

Perfected for Kobo’s free apps for Android and iOS platforms and the company’s stunning new lineup of Kobo Arc tablets, such as the newly-released Kobo Arc 10HD, Readers can now enjoy hundreds of their favourite pop culture, health, sports and style magazines, with new titles being added every day. Kobo preserves the experience intended by magazine publishers, with a visually rich display that makes reading easy on any tablet or smartphone using Kobo’s Guided Reading. Guided Reading replaces panning and zooming around a page with a simple one-tap interface that intelligently moves from one column of text to the next. Removing distractions so Readers can focus on the content, Kobo eliminates the need for toolbars – creating a more crisp and clean interface. The new experience, developed with the same digital publishing tools Kobo offers to publishers, significantly improves the magazine reading experience, letting Readers enjoy magazines for what they are – the perfect mix of ideas, entertainment, and design.

DIGITAL READING IS FUN FOR KIDS

In a whitepaper published by Kobo, Scholastic contributed that of children who have read an eBook, one in five said that they are reading more books for fun. In addition, almost half of all children ages six to 17 said they would read more books for fun if they had greater access to eBooks. With Kobo’s new Kids Store and colourful, interactive eBooks, Kobo makes it easier to find the next great book for children and young adult Readers, with the latest bestselling series, Read Along books, and colourful picture-books.

This summer, Kobo will be offering parents the ability to set up dedicated accounts for their kids so that they can safely explore the amazing titles within the Kobo eBookstore. With almost 100,000 titles in its library, Kobo will give parents the ability to set spending allowances for their kids, pre-select eBooks, and adjust search-settings to keep their kids reading safely. Parents are also able to set reading goals for kids and track their progress with engaging reading stats – all features designed to make eReading an educational, fun, and friendly experience. The dedicated Kids Store will be available this September in North America, United Kingdom, France, and Italy, and will then be made available internationally.

For more information, please visit www.kobo.com

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KOBO BRINGS POCKET’S SERVICE TO ITS EREADING PLATFORM

Kobo offers convenient, easy offline access to web content with Pocket’s save-for-later platform, available on Kobo’s eReaders, apps and tablets

AUCKLAND, New Zealand, August 28, 2013 – Kobo, a global leader in eReading, today announced a new partnership with Pocket, a San-Francisco based company that lets users save and consume interesting web content they discover on a variety of devices. Kobo is the first eReading company to bring the convenience of the Pocket platform to its E Ink eReaders as well as its tablets.

“Just like Kobo, Pocket understands that Reading is a passion, something that is coveted, deeply personal, and attacked with voracious appetite. Through our partnership, we are able to help our Readers go beyond the book, and curate content from almost any source - to read later,” said Michael Serbinis, CEO, Kobo. “We are excited to partner with a company that shares our mission to provide Readers with the best reading experience and encourages people to read and read more often.”

Today, people are reading books five times more on eReaders than with apps and more than 90 percent of Kobo customers read every week, with the majority of them reading every day. At the same time, each month Pocket users read the equivalent of three books' worth of content saved from across the web. With people reading more, at different times and in different ways, Kobo and Pocket understand the importance of offering a convenient platform for Readers to access content easily and on any device they choose—regardless of internet connection.

“This is the first time we’ve partnered directly with a manufacturer to bring Pocket to a native eReading device,” said Nate Weiner, CEO and Founder, Pocket. "Through our work with Kobo, Readers are able to take all of the interesting articles they find on the web and deliver it directly to the native eReading experience.”

With Pocket, Kobo gives Readers a way to save and view the articles they want to read later from their browser and more than 400 other popular apps like Twitter, Flipboard, Pulse and Zite, and view it on their Kobo E Ink eReaders and tablets. When Kobo Readers find an interesting article, they can save it to Pocket then view it as easily as they view any book content on their eReader, whether they are online or offline. The integration with Pocket is available as part of Kobo’s enhanced Reading Life platform in the Articles from Pocket section on the Kobo Aura 6” eReader, and on Kobo Arc 10HD, Kobo Arc 7 and 7HD tablets. Current Pocket users can simply log in for instant access to their list, and new users can sign up for a free Pocket account.

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