Today Kobo has announced that they have purchased Aquafadas to bring kids books, comics, academic texts and magazines into the Kobo ecosystem.
Aquafadas is based in France and boasts a user-base of over 50,000 individuals and companies. It originally launched in 2004 and grew into one of the larger companies focusing on rich media and offers the most advanced Digital Publishing System that covers all aspects of digital publishing from content design to cross-platforms distribution and analytics. It combines the most advanced content design tools with a versatile library of ready-to-use apps, ePub3 export, and a Web reader. Aquafadas enables publishers across industries to create richly designed books, children’s books, graphic novels, magazines, newspapers, marketing communications, and corporate publishing, all without writing a single line of code. Aquafadas will add a new distribution channel to its universal solution: publishers will have access to massive distribution through the Kobo platform.
“This is a very exciting day for both Kobo and Aquafadas,” commented Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis. “Digital Reading is rapidly evolving now to new rich media categories. This transaction will strengthen both Kobo’s and Aquafadas position in our current markets and allow us to accelerate the growth of rich media with the Aquafadas Digital Publishing system.”
“Kobo’s arrival is amazing news,” add Aquafadas CEO Claudia Zimmer. “Thanks to this acquisition, publishers who use Aquafadas Publishing System will benefit from an easy, scalable, solution that will provide access to a new distribution channel in addition to other channels: Kobo’s platform and its 10 million registered users. We will benefit significantly from this partnership and amp up development to deliver more innovative tools. By working together to further enhance the Kobo product line-up the creation of rich-media content, Kobo and Aquafadas will take digital reading to a new level.”
There is no word yet on how this new system will be implemented into Kobo Writing Life and if indie authors will have access to this advanced toolset to start making more rich media content to be showcased on the Kobo Arc and the myriad of apps for the iPad and Android. It is a given that publishers will be able to customize content for the expansive Kobo ecosystem, but many already have their own proprietary tools.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
