“Our sales data from Belgium, the Netherlands and Canada suggests that having your books in Kobo Plus has a positive impact on à la carte sales. Publishers sell more à la carte, and generate increased revenue from subscription sales on top of that.”
It seems like only yesterday we were reporting on the launch of the unlimited subscription service Kobo Plus in Australia. No, wait, it was only yesterday.
In our haste to break the news – before Kobo made its official announcement – we overlooked an obvious possibility – that any deal for Australia was likely to also include New Zealand. The two countries are, after all, in global publishing terms (locally they’d probably disagree strenuously) very much hand in glove, generally thrown together as “Commonwealth” when UK publishers play their anachronistic territorial rights games.
Curiously while the official Kobo press release confirms the Australia launch, in partnership with Australia’s biggest online book store, Booktopia, Kobo Plus New Zealand remains hidden news.
As covered in our initial report yesterday –
Kobo Plus began life in the Netherlands and has since expanded to Belgium, Portugal and Canada and now of course Australia and New Zealand.
One says “of course”, but actually the official press release as linked above makes no mention of Kobo Plus New Zealand, and we have to rely on the separate newsletter to Kobo Writing Life authors to learn that Kobo Plus is also available in New Zealand.
Not mentioned in the Kobo press release about the Australia launch, the Kobo Writing Life newsletter shares an important snippet about data derived from the Netherlands, Belgium and Canada Kobo Plus launches (Portugal too recent to have any meaningful statistics):
Our sales data from Belgium, the Netherlands and Canada suggests that having books in Kobo Plus has a positive impact on à la carte sales. Publishers sell more à la carte, and generate increased revenue from subscription sales on top of that.
The New Zealand addition means Kobo Plus now has an unlimited subscription option in three of the Big 5 mature English-language markets.
The big question left unanswered is if Kobo might be seriously looking at the US and UK as Kobo Plus markets.
Kobo carries enough material from indie authors to offer a respectably-sized catalogue (Kindle Plus AU launches with 580,000 titles), and at least some publishers in the US and UK might come on board, if only to gain some counterweight leverage over the domination of the US and UK unlimited subscription arena Amazon has with Kindle Unlimited.
