High street stationery shop WH Smith will be opening dedicated Kobo outlets within 100 of its branches to help promote the range of reader tablets as Amazon ships its latest and greatest, the Kindle Touch, in the United Kingdom today – week ahead of originally scheduled.
WH Smith is one of a few U.K sellers of Kobo hardware and the device was launched ahead of the Christmas reader buying frenzy, undercutting the £89 basic Kindle by around £20. Kobo now boasts a line-up of three e-ink display reader tablets: a £59.99 6-inch reader with Wi-Fi and “physical” buttons, a £79.99 6-inch touchscreen reader also with Wi-Fi called the Kobo Touch and the 7-inch Kobo Vox which features touchscreen and wireless connection. And whereas Kindle is restricted to its own file types, Kobo uses a universal format (Adobe DRM) meaning books bought can be run on other compatible Android and Apple iOS applications. Higher spec Kindle readers do however benefit from an always on free 3G connection which Kobo doesn’t offer.
All three models will be available in the dedicated store section and experts will be on hand to advise new buyers on which Kobo is best for them as well as demonstrating features including accessing the kobobooks store where there are over 2.2 million eBooks, including over 1 million free titles available to download.
No news on when these stores-within-a-store will open but we will update the story when possible. Until then you can check out the Kobo ebook reader range available through WH Smith on the website.
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