14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that the Amazon Kindle is not the only e-reader that caused its supplier to grin with glee, metaphorically or otherwise, by selling like mad, as Kobo claims to have experienced something similar over the holidays.
Since the winter holiday season always implies that a lot of electronics get bought, it is a given that popular products would sell by the thousands.
E-readers in particular seem to have sold strongly during the month of December, and many of them were given as presents, considering the high number of activations during Christmas.
Amazon, for example, named its Kindle the best-selling product of all time and, while B&N found that so many Nooks attempted to activate at once that their servers crashed.
Now, Kobo has issued a press release in which it states that its own e-reader performed similarly, with hundreds of thousands eReader platforms getting activated each day since December 24.
This holiday season, Kobo e-book sales supposedly grew by a factor of 50 over what 2009 allowed.
This major surge was owed to the fact that its e-book, newspaper and magazine store, which holds over 2.2 million different publications/issues, became accessible to 130 countries.
Also, over a million people entered the Kobo e-book ecosystem, and this includes both Kobo e-reader buyers as well as those that downloaded the Kobo app.
The latter group of users may or may not have utilized the app on such products as iPads, iPhones and Blackberry smartphones.
"Earlier this month we predicted that Christmas would be a record breaker for Kobo, and we have exceeded our expectations driving several ebook downloads per second since Christmas Eve, or an equivalent number hardcover books stacked as high as 50 Empire State Buildings," said Michael Serbinis, CEO of Kobo.
“I would like to thank our customers for choosing Kobo to start building their digital library this Christmas. Our success this holiday season is a pre-cursor to a New Year with people reading more than ever thanks to eBooks and Kobo.”