It’s not all black and white as Kobo gets colourful

Kobo has ended a 14-year black-and-white stretch with its first colour e-reader range. But there are different opinions within the company itself as to who it will attract.

Rakuten Kobo chief executive Michael Tamblyn

Kobo has for the first time released two new e-readers in colour, ending a 14-year-long period in the world of black-and-white books.

The move from the Japanese-owned Canadian brand arrives as it steps up its battle against its number one competitor, Amazon Kindle – but not before others in the market.

Behind the shift is not an attempt to capture another group of readers but rather one that has been a long time in the making, chief executive Michael Tamblyn told The Australian during a recent visit.

“For us, we were really watching two curves and waiting for them to intersect. One of them was the price of colour e-ink screens and the other was watching the quality of colour coming up,” he said.

Kobo's Libra eReader now supports colour.

“This year was really the first year that those two lines intersected in a way that felt interesting for us. There have been other colour devices in the market but they generally haven’t been very high in quality and they have generally been very expensive.”

Kobo’s e-readers range from $239.95 to $629.95 – the latter more expensive option encompassing note-taking ability.

If the company attempted to make colour models in the past it would have doubled the price of devices at the bottom of the market, he said.

The view on how colour will fare among readers has the company split into two distinct teams. One believes e-readers will surge in popularity among fans of Manga – Japanese graphic novels – while others just think coloured book covers will help sell titles.

“This is a subject of what I’d call fierce but friendly debate within the company,” Mr Tamblyn said.

In any case, e-readers are finally having a moment, Mr Tamblyn said, which was largely thanks to the pandemic.

“The pandemic was a fascinating time to be running a company like this,” he said. “We saw this real explosion of interest that happened as people couldn’t get to a bookstore or a library so that introduced a lot of people to ebooks for the first time.”

While interest spiked, the company held off cashing in too early because it didn’t want to be accused of selling vital resources in an emergency.

“Especially during the first six months of the pandemic, you couldn’t really market into that because you didn’t want to be like selling life jackets when a ship was sinking,” he said. “So what we did was give away lots of e-books.”

Book titles in the Kobo Libra.

The giveaway started in Italy and within four months the company had given out over 10 million e-books.

As the pandemic neared its end, the company was fearful that everyone would give up their new-found hobby. But as it turns out, people still liked to read, just not as much, Mr Tamblyn said. “They kept reading. Customers stayed as they had kind of gained a new habit in reading e-books but we did see the frequency of reading go down because now they could go out into the world again.”

The company also didn’t face many of the issues related to chip shortages that other electronics manufacturers did thanks to working with factories in Taiwan and China. When it came to transporting them out of both countries, they were light enough to fly.

“We were able to keep our supply chain full and we are fortunate that e-readers are small and light, and we could fly them out of China when we couldn’t get shipping for love or money,” he said.

“And even when our factory outside of Shanghai was down, we were able to keep the Taiwan factory up and running.”

The eReader sales continued to rise moving out of the pandemic as people had learned the device was one they could use to get away from digital distractions, Mr Tamblyn said.

That view was at odds with what most people had imagined of the industry in the early 2010s where the consensus was that smartphones would kill off the industry.

“We were always like, ‘uh, I hope not’,” he said. But as a bit of an insurance policy it took to launching a Kobo app for e-books on iOS and Android.

“But what we have found over time was that people were using e-readers, not just kind of as an adjunct device, but actually as a way to get away from their phones,” Mr Tamblyn said.

The idea was also one many parents approved, viewing the limited ability to use an electronic device to read as positive.

“Serious readers who were 40 years old and over were once kind of a core demographic for us but now we’re seeing 16,17 and 18-year-olds showing up, partly driven by parents who say this is a screen that I don’t mind my kids spending all their time with.”