Kobo, the Rakuten-owned e-reading company, has announced that it is to acquire the French digital publishing platform Aquafadas to bolster the breadth of content that is available to its e-reader devices, for which it claims 10 million users in 190 countries. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed.
The acquisition gives Kobo access to the Aquafadas Digital Publishing System, which the company says will able it to bring a selection of rich media – magazines, academic, comics, kid’s books and more to its customers, by providing better content creation tools for publishers.
Aquafadas’s Digital Publishing System offer a complete digital publishing suite — from content design to cross-platforms distribution and analytics, and combines content design tools with a “versatile library of ready-to-use apps”, ePub3 export, and a Web reader. Thus enabling publishers to create richly designed books, children’s books, graphic novels, magazines, newspapers, marketing communications, and corporate publishing, without the need for coding chops. The Kobo hook up is about bringing distribution directly to that publishing platform.
In related news, Kobo’s self-publishing platform, Kobo Writing Life, is now available in German, French, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch, in addition to English – with several new languages planned “over the coming months”. Since its launch in July, the company says that Kobo Writing Life has doubled month over month, with authors spanning 82 countries, publishing in 17 languages. Its Writing Life self-publishing feature should also benefit from today’s acquisition.
