Canadian e-book seller, Kobo, announced late last week that it had acquired French company Aquafadas but did not give any further details regarding the financial parameters of the deal. The Toronto based Kobo bought Aquafadas so that it could add magazines, comics, and children’s books to its already large e-book collection. Aquafadas will help the firm do this because it has developed a service that lets publishers create digital content for smartphones, tablets, HTML5 and video without having any technical skills.
Todd Humphrey, EVP of Business Development for Kobo, talked about his company’s purchase, stating that, “As the global e-reading industry continues to expand and does so rapidly we really view digital content to be a variety of different media, whether its comics and magazines, newspapers, kids books. All those elements need to be part of our solution. Our long term vision of course is to bring e-reading to billions of people around the world, and we can’t just do that with books. Therefore, this acquisition allows us to move even faster to include rich media content into our offering.”
Humphrey spoke about the benefits of buying the French firm by stating that, “We get the advantage of all of what they’ve built, whether its technology or partnerships, so there will be an integration on both of those things on the business side and the technical side. The publishers we’ve talked to are super excited about Aquafadas as a tool and a development platform, and this now allows them gain access to over 10 million customers, so this really is a win-win.”
Along with the acquisition news, Kobo made public that it had added several more languages to its own self-publishing platform. From now on Kobo Writing Life will be available in German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch. Kobo’s Writing Life does have some tough competition with several start-ups taking on the self publication market, however, having Aquafadas on their side will give users of Kobo’s service the advantage of putting their content on multiple devices.
The purchase of Aquafadas is the first one for Kobo and it seems logical for the firm to make the acquisition because it allows the Canadian company to bring the smaller content creator into its fold. It can now count on these publishers to also drive traffic to their service by offering more unique content. The large inventory and variety of material should attract a wider audience and help Kobo become a dominant player in its sector.
Source: BetaKit
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