Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Mobile
  3. News

Ebook company Kobo set to go head-to-head with Audible in the audiobooks market

Lulu Chang
By

Kobo Aura One ebook reader
Image used with permission by copyright holder
You can finally look beyond Audible if you’re in the market for an audiobook. This week, Canadian company Rakuten Kobo, known for its ebook readers and library, expanded its offerings by diving into the audiobooks marketplace. So if turning physical pages is too much for your fingers and reading epaper screens is too much for your eyes, rest assured that you can still consume literature thanks to this new service.

Subscriptions to the new service start at $10 a month, or more casual readers (or listeners) have the choice of buying titles a la carte. Promising books across a wide range of genres, including bestsellers like Into the Water by Paula Hawkins, Truly Madly Guilty by Lianne Moriarty, and the Harry Potter series; Kobo notes that its expansive library could make a bibliophile out of just about anyone.

Recommended Videos

“We have more books than time, always. Audiobooks let our readers fit the books they love into more parts of their day,” Rakuten Kobo CEO Michael Tamblyn said. “Audio lets you be in two places at once — exploring the galaxy on the daily commute, solving a crime while doing the laundry, or wherever you want your favorite story to take you.”

Related

Tamblyn continued: “Last year, we built the Kobo Aura ONE eReader with the help of our best customers, and our new offering is no different. What we unequivocally heard was that they wanted the best deal on audiobooks, and we are pleased to offer the lowest subscription price available.”

Both audiobooks and ebooks from Kobo can be accessed via the Android or iOS app in an intuitively designed player. You can easily swipe through an audiobook and keep tabs on exactly where you are in a narrative. Plus, Kobo promises that you can see how much time is left in a book at a glance, and also select your narration speed. If you tend to use audiobooks as lullabies, you can even set books to turn off after a set amount of time so you’re lulled to sleep by a reader, but won’t snore through major plot points.

Like other services, you can sign up for a 30-day free trial of Kobo audiobooks, and also download your first audiobook for free.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Lulu Chang
Lulu Chang
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Fascinated by the effects of technology on human interaction, Lulu believes that if her parents can use your new app…
The 6 biggest announcements we expect from Google I/O 2024
Google I/O 2019

Google will hold its annual developer conference, Google I/O 2024, on May 14 in Mountain View, California. The event is about a month away, and we're expecting a few big announcements.

As with any Google I/O event, this year's conference will start with a big opening keynote presentation from CEO Sundar Pichai. But what actual announcements are we looking forward to? Here are a few of the biggest things that we are likely to see at Google I/O 2024.
Android 15

Read more
This crazy headband uses music and brainwaves to make you a better athlete
A person wearing the Alphabeats headband.

This company wants you to put on a headband and listen to music while the device's sensors in it read your brainwaves to help you focus and to increase your sporting performance. It’s called Alphabeats, and the electroencephalogram (EEG) headband combines with your choice of music and an app on your phone to help train your brain to either stay in its top-focused state or concentrate on its requirements in the moment, whether that’s relaxation, recovery, or sleep.

Aimed at professional ahtletes or highly motivated amateurs, Alphabeats won a CES 2023 Innovation award and is now available for pre-order. It costs $499 at the moment, but the price will increase to $689 after the promotional period ends. You probably won’t be surprised to learn (given the recent growing and  unfortunate trend) that this price includes a year’s subscription to the service, but at the time of writing, there’s no information about how much the subscription will cost after the first year.

Read more
Here’s how Apple could change your iPhone forever
An iPhone 15 Pro Max laying on its back, showing its home screen.

Over the past few months, Apple has released a steady stream of research papers detailing its work with generative AI. So far, Apple has been tight-lipped about what exactly is cooking in its research labs, while rumors circulate that Apple is in talks with Google to license its Gemini AI for iPhones.

But there have been a couple of teasers of what we can expect. In February, an Apple research paper detailed an open-source model called MLLM-Guided Image Editing (MGIE) that is capable of media editing using natural language instructions from users. Now, another research paper on Ferret UI has sent the AI community into a frenzy.

Read more