Michael Tamblyn

Ellen Harvey is a freelance writer and editor who covers the latest technologies and strategies reshaping the publishing landscape. She previously served as the Senior Editor at Publishing Executive and Book Business.

Kobo won't release an ereader with a colour screen until authors "start writing novels in colour" according to company president Michael Tamblyn. He said colour screens and interactive features would continue "on the tablet and app side", which now accounts for half of Kobo's business.

Tamblyn was speaking ahead of the launch of Kobo's latest ereader, the Kobo Glo HD. He said ereaders needed to have the "best possible screen" as Kobo and Amazon "fight for those most avid and voracious readers".

The Kobo Glo HD won’t be available in the US until May 1, but when it arrives it’ll bring with it a display every bit as pixel-packed as Amazon’s stunning Kindle Voyage—at a $70 discount. The Glo HD also doesn’t appear to be cutting many hardware corners elsewhere to make up the cost; it’s just as light as the Voyage, and only very slightly thicker. The two use the same Carta E-Ink technology. Both are front-lit, though the Voyage finds a small advantage by automatically adjusting the brightness

Last year, the release of the Hollywood adaptation of Gillian Flynn's 2012 novel "Gone Girl" propelled the book onto best-seller lists in several countries around the world. Millions of people bought it, but how many of them actually read it from cover to cover? The Toronto-based e-reading platform Kobo, which delivers digital books to 23 million people in 190 countries and is a competitor to Amazon Kindle, recently released statistics for 2014 that showed the best-selling books in the company's major markets and how frequently readers finished the titles they bought.

Last Friday Michael Tamblyn, president and COO of ereading platform Kobo, took to Twitter with a 32-tweet manifesto on the Amazon-Hachette dispute. Tamblyn's tweets were meant to sway self-published authors from so heartily supporting Amazon, as many have throughout Hachette's negotiations. (Here's a link to the first in the series, but you can trace the whole monologue on Twitter starting on the morning of October 17th.)

Kobo to Focus Exclusively on eReaders and Apps (GoodeReader) The brand new Kobo H2O waterproof e-reader started shipping last week and CEO Michael Tamblyn said had achieved the highest rate of pre-orders of any other Kobo device. However, he also revealed tablet devices were no longer a focus area for the company. Instead, it will […]

The post Morning Roundup: Kobo to focus on eReaders and apps. Librarians respond to Adobe issue appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

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