The Digital Reader reports that
Rakuten's launch of the
Kobo Touch in
Japan isn't going quite as expected. Despite the company's "Kill Amazon"
chest-beating a few weeks ago, actual customers aren't thrilled about
the Kobo Touch eReader. Reviews on the website gave the eReader an
average rating of 2.96 out of 5, and reviews were fairly equally split
between four stars and one star. I'm using the past tense because
Rakuten took the entire review page off its website. Reviews of the
eReader complained about "...crashing setup of kobo desktop application,
very limited offer of Japanese books, unresponsive touch screens, poor
customer service, etc."
To be fair, the Kobo Touch has only been on sale in Japan for a week,
and there are almost always problems at launch. However, the Kobo Touch
isn't a new product--it's been shipping for more than a year. Rakuten
may have believed that its dominance of the Japanese eCommerce market
would allow it to quickly build comparable dominance of the country's
eBook market. However, if they don't fix the problems with the
Japanese-language Kobo Touch quickly, what's more likely is that they'll
either kill the domestic eBook market or hand it to Amazon.
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