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April 18- April 24, 2011 Edition Kobo Gets $50 Million in eReading Funding
TORONTO, ON/AUTHORLINK NEWS/April 20, 2011Kobo, a global leader in eReading yesterday closed a $50 Million investment round led by a leading institutional investor. Existing investors also participated in the round; investing $13M.
Kobo will use the new funding to continue its explosive growth internationally, said Greg Twinney, CFO of Kobo. As the eReading space continues to heat up, Kobo is committed to providing an innovative experience that lets consumers read anytime, anyplace and share their love of reading with friends.
Kobo kicked off its European expansion last week, with the announcement of its plans to launch local content stores in Germany the largest book market outside of the US and Spain starting in May 2011. Local stores for France, Italy and the Netherlands will follow this summer an industry first. In providing local content and reading experiences for European readers, Kobo continues to build on the vision of giving people around the world the freedom to read on any device, and share their love of reading with friends.
Starting today, consumers can buy the highly anticipated BlackBerry- PlayBook- which comes pre-loaded with the Kobo eReading app in leading retailers across Canada and the US. .
The Kobo eReading app delivers a personalized reading experience and allows users to choose the perfect text size and style, select between day and night mode, both featuring uninterrupted reading with seamless page turns and chapter transitions. Plus, readers can switch between single or side-by-side page view simply in landscape orientation or simply rotate the BlackBerry PlayBook to read in portrait orientation. Kobo is offering a free copy of Thomas Clearys translation of The Art of War exclusively to BlackBerry PlayBook customers. Users can sign in or create their Kobo account from the BlackBerry PlayBook and the free eBook will be added directly to their library. Since Kobos launch in December 2009, Kobo has one of the largest stores worldwide: over 2.3 million eBooks, newspapers and magazines making it one of the largest online stores in the world. The site has over 3.2 million Users, with over 1 million users added in the last 90 days.
The company is dedicated to an open cloud-based platform, enabling users build their lifetime library, and access it from any device. Kobo has developed and launched two industry leading eReaders; the Kobo eReader and the Kobo Wireless eReader, and is top ranked for leading e-reading applications such as iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Palm WebOS, Windows, MacOS. Kobo already offers locally merchandised English language stores in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong with Germany and Spain launching in May, and France, Italy and the Netherlands launching this summer.
