Kobo Insiders website cover
Although the ebook is the flagship digital product, lately the audiobook is gaining more fame and being the center of many companies. Now it looks like the audiobook is in Kobo Rakuten's point of view.
Apparently for the last few days the company has been asking its users about podcasts, about audiobooks and everything related to this new digital product.
The intention of Kobo seems to be to offer a section of audiobooks or offer a service via streaming audiobooks as its main competitor Amazon is currently doing with Audible.
Many are already talking about a service similar to Audible of audiobooks within Kobo
Over the past year, the audiobook market moved more than 3 million dollars only in the United States, being larger in other countries and increasingly large and popular, a market too large to turn its back. That is why Kobo may try to work with audiobooks or at least I looked at how to enter this market. However Kobo's interest seems to passes by using or improving Overdrive, the library loan service that you recently acquired and that works with this digital format.
While the latter is the most plausible, it is also true that sooner or later Rakuten will bring together Kobo and Overdrive under the same service or the same department, so work may already be done on improving the audiobook experience for the not-too-distant future. In any case, we must not forget that all this comes from the questions that have been made in the insider program, a program that does not announce the imminent but where the interests of Kobo will go, interests that could be useful for some users who want or use audiobooks in addition to ebooks.