Mexico is a country that many companies are bullish about because it has over 100 million mobile phones and half of the population is under 27. This has prompted Kobo to enter the market, striking partnerships with numerous bookstores to have their e-readers available to purchase.
Kobo will power the eBookstore for both publisher and retailer Libreria PorrĂșa, with nearly 70 bookstores in Mexico and, Gandhi, the chain of nearly 30 stores. While the two retailers are competitors in other areas of business, they have jointly created a new service called Orbile, powered by Kobo, to offer a unified e-Reading service to Mexican readers.
The newly created digital bookstoree will be open for business in September 2015, offering a full and rich catalog with more than 70,000 titles in Spanish, within a total of 4 million titles. Kobo will also be creating a new co-branded e-reading app for Android and iOS if people don’t want to buy the hardware.
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.