Borders and Kobo

Over this weekend news broke that Borders is closing all of its stores for good. This comes after they filed for bankruptcy earlier this year and closed some of their stores, but not all of them.

Some analysts and bloggers have speculated that bookstores are having a hard time because of the growing popularity of online shopping. That includes online shopping for paper books as well as shopping online for ebooks. Between both of those, old-fashioned bookstores have lost much of their foot traffic. This is also on top of Amazon’s extremely low prices that small bookstores have never been able to compete with.

When I heard the news that Borders was completely shutting down, the first thing I thought of was Kobo. I was under the impression that they were owned by Borders, but it turns out that Borders only owned an 11% stake in the company, according to this article on PCMag. The article also says that Kobo has its own agreements with major book publishers and does not rely on Borders for content.

If you bought a Kobo eReader at a Borders store, you probably set up your account through them instead of directly with Kobo. Kobo has a way for you to transition your account to Kobo and move it away from Borders. You can see instructions for that here. You can also get content for your Kobo eReader from independent stores like eBookMall (see their Kobo page for info).