As of this month, Best Buy stores in the U.S. have begun selling a selection of Rakuten Kobo e-readers and accessories, marking a return to U.S. retail for the Japanese-owned Canadian bookseller.

The company previously sold e-readers through Walmart starting in 2018, but that relationship never gained much traction and ended in 2024. Since then, devices were available to order through Kobo's U.S. website and third-party retailers like BlueProton.com.

Kobo is a prominent e-bookseller in Canada, where it has long partnered with Indigo—its former parent company—and sells devices in their stores, as well as in Best Buy Canada. But the American market, where Amazon has dominated the e-book space since the launch of the Kindle, has been harder to penetrate.

The company has had a partnership with the American Booksellers Association since 2012, which allows independent bookstores to sell Kobo ebooks through an affiliate program. While Kobo initially sold devices at select indie stores, and there was early excitement, few stores actively promote the option, though it is still available.

"We've treated the U.S. as a market that we carefully feel our way through," Tamblyn tells PW, noting that its new deal with Best Buy follows the doubling of Kobo's U.S. sales in both 2025 and 2026.

What changed? Tamblyn identifies a wide variety of converging factors. On the device side, Kobo was the first to sell next-generation color e-readers in 2024, something which he says "galvanized a lot of interest," as Amazon took longer to release their own device.

There's also been more visibility of e-readers on social media, as tiny, magnetic e-readers that attach to the back of your phone have gone viral. (Tamblyn noted the trend, but would not confirm if Kobo was working on a small, competitive device.)

Next, Tamblyn pointed to demographic and cultural shifts. "Readers who grew accustomed to screen reading during pandemic-era schooling are now moving into their long-form reading years," he says. Rising print book prices and increased visibility for e-readers on TikTok and Instagram are also helping raise awareness among younger generations.

Kobo's responsiveness to that social media–driven customer base extends into product design. After noticing customers on TikTok were modifying game controllers into makeshift page-turning devices, Tamblyn says, the company built its own dedicated remote.

Finally, politics, Tamblyn believes, is playing a role too. "People who have been, I think, much more conscious about what kinds of companies they're supporting in the context of the current landscape, prompting them to leave big tech ecosystems and look for alternatives," he says.

Kobo built Libby integration directly into its e-readers after concluding that a customer connecting their device to a public library was likely to be, in Tamblyn's words, "a durable library patron" worth serving.

"We can either throw ourselves against trying to sell them a book, or do the thing that they want us to do, which is make that connection as good as it can be," he says. The same might be said for influencers, who can now use Libby to read library books on their devices, and can read ARCs on the device through NetGalley.

Tamblyn describes the appeal of single-purpose e-readers, as opposed to multipurpose tablets or phones, in similar terms.

"Here's the device that only does one thing," he says. "It's the thing that I want it to do. It doesn't sell my data anywhere. It doesn't try to put an ad in front of me. It doesn't have a message coming at me from my boss. I just get to read," he says.

Challenging Kindle abroad

Internationally, Tamblyn says Kobo's business is now split roughly evenly among Asia, the Americas, and Europe, with a different strategy in each region.

In Europe, the company works through established retail partners, including FNAC in France and Spain; Mondadori and Feltrinelli in Italy; and Leya in Portugal. In Germany, where Kobo is partnered with Tolino, Tamblyn says Kobo holds roughly 40% of the market to Amazon's 45%, with the remainder split among smaller players.

"Amazon is dominant in e-books in exactly two markets: the U.S. and the U.K.," Tamblyn says, but elsewhere, "it is actually competitive, territory by territory."

The company is competitive on several fronts, from its catalog, which offers a similar selection to Kindle, as well as a self-publishing platform, Kobo Writing Life, which Tamblyn says is positioned to be a more flexible alternative to Kindle Direct Publishing.

In Asia, Kobo's flagship market is Japan, where it operates through corporate parent Rakuten and where reading skews heavily toward manga on phones, according to Tamblyn. Kobo is the top e-bookseller in Taiwan, he says, and has expanded market by market into Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia.

In the Americas, Kobo expanded into South America in 2026, becoming the first company to make e-readers available in Argentina, according to Tamblyn, and has since moved into Chile. In Mexico, the company works with booksellers Gandhi and Porrúa. In the Middle East, Kobo has an established partnership with Turkish bookstore chain D&R, and is continuing to develop an Arabic-language catalog, a process Tamblyn says has taken years to reach commercial viability. Kobo launched in India several years ago and currently offers an English-only catalog.

The e-reading landscape

When it comes to innovation, Tamblyn pointed to the growing popularity of e-readers that double as note-taking devices. Kobo's approach to this category, dominated by companies like Boox, grew out of research into why nonfiction readers were slower than fiction readers to adopt e-books.

When Kobo brought together a group of nonfiction readers to ask what was holding them back from e-books, Tamblyn says, the most common answer was, "I read with a pen in my hand. I read with a highlighter in my hand." They described reading as research or study, rather than an immersive or escapist experience. That led Kobo to build stylus-based annotation into its devices, including a patented feature allowing users to write across a full page—a capability he says no competing e-reader offers.

The effect on reading habits has been measurable, according to Tamblyn: customers who use a stylus-equipped device show a roughly 50/50 split between fiction and nonfiction reading, compared with a roughly 80/20 fiction-to-nonfiction split among customers without a stylus.

Tamblyn was candid about gender breakdowns among Kobo's customers, an area he says companies in the space often decline to discuss publicly. Kobo's North American customer base runs roughly 70% female to 30% male, he says, a split that shifts toward men with nonfiction reading and stylus-equipped devices. The ratio varies significantly by market: In Japan, Malaysia, and Singapore, the split is much closer to even, while in Brazil, users are mostly male, according to Tamblyn.

Asked about the broader, long-documented decline in U.S. reading rates, Tamblyn says the erosion is concentrated among occasional readers rather than habitual ones.

"We're losing the person who reads one book a year," he says. "And that was the person who bought their one Tom Clancy novel when they went on vacation, because you needed something to read on the plane because there was nothing else to do on the plane. Now that the plane has Wi-Fi, and so does that beach, that person is scrolling, not reading."

This shift, Tamblyn says, accounts for roughly five percentage points of annual decline in the number of Americans who finish a book each year. "We haven't been losing the person who reads 12 books a year... that cohort is very stable," he says.