Rakuten deals with bad reviews of the Kobo Touch by deleting them

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.

Rakuten makes it clear that it intends to dominate the Japanese eBook market

Publishing Perspectives reports on a panel discussion at last week's Tokyo E-Book Expo, which featured Hiroshi Mikitani, the head of Rakuten, the Japanese eCommerce company that acquired Kobo, and Seiji Noma of Kodansha, the largest Japanese publisher. Before the panel even began, Noma held up a T-shirt he had been given by Mikitani, which said "Destroy Amazon". That's not how things are normally done in Japan, and it was a sign that the two companies are serious about preventing Amazon from becoming a major player in the Japanese market. For its part, Rakuten is now calling its eBook business "Rakuten Kobo," and is de-emphasizing the Kobo name for everything except the eReaders themselves. Mikitani's target is to get one million Japanese-language books digitized--a lofty goal, given that Japan has one of the lowest rates of eBook usage of any developed country.

Rakuten to save taxes by supplying eBooks to Japan via Canada

GoodEReader reports that Rakuten, the Japanese eCommerce giant that purchased Kobo, plans to start selling eBooks in Japan. To avoid having to charge the Japanese 5% consumption tax, which will increase to 15% by the end of the year, the eBooks will actually be sold from Kobo's headquarters in Canada. This strategy is the same as Amazon's tactic of basing an eBook distribution center in Luxembourg, which opened in December of last year. Instead of paying the U.K.'s 20% VAT on eBooks, Amazon customers pay only Luxembourg's 3% eBook VAT.