It’s hard to keep up with the multitude of e-readers on the market these days. With the public eye squarely on Amazon and Apple’s own book system, the smaller players are doing their best to keep up with the Jones’. Obviously these companies are going to have a hard time beating out the downloadable content of Amazon, but Kobo aims at getting people to use their app to help them read the web.

With an e-reader of their own on sale for $149, Kobo isn’t exactly the smallest of the Amazon challengers. Their app seems to be doing fairly well, and has some cool features that are unique to the platform, such as its innovative social reading platform. Called “Reading Life,” iPad users can now view statistics about their user preferences and even earn achievements for their reading prowess.

The newest feature in their standard app is its integration with Instapaper, which allows users to read long form web text, save text for later viewing, and allows users to sync their Instapaper text instantly to their other iOS devices.

“People are constantly discovering a wide variety of great information on the web, but they don’t always have the time to read everything that they come across,” said Mike Serbinis, Kobo CEO. “With Kobo’s integration with Instapaper, readers can clip, save, and read this content anytime, anyplace they choose using the Kobo eReading application for iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch.”

Kobo currently has over 2.2 million e-books in its library, from free classics to New York Times bestsellers, and has a subscription plan that offers acces to many of the most popular newspapers and magazines. Their system is all cloud based and uses open standards, so choosing Kobo allows users to build their libraries without getting stuck on a particular platform. The app is free too, so give it a try. You may just like it.

FREE!

Kobo Books

+ Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad
Released: 2009-02-26 :: Category: Books