Borders Kobo
Barnes & Noble’s chief bricks and mortar competitor, Borders, offers its own competing eBook reader, the Kobo (see Figure 3). To be precise, the Kobo wasn’t developed or manufactured by Borders, but rather is the product of Canadian company Kobo, Inc. It’s distributed in the U.S. and Australia by Borders, in Canada by the Indigo/Chapters bookstore chain, and by other booksellers in other countries.
Figure 3 The Kobo eBook reader, distributed by Borders.
The Kobo is a lot like B&N’s original NOOK, or the previous generation Kindle. It uses the original E-ink technology in a 6” display, and sells for $119. The Kobo was recently upgraded to include WiFi wireless technology, and comes preloaded with 100 public domain novels.
The Kobo reads books in the universal EPUB format; it cannot read books in Amazon’s MOBI format. Borders offers more than 1 million EPUB-format books in its online e-bookstore.