Is Japan's Rakuten the second biggest player in the western ebook and audiobook market? - The New Publishing Standard

Panzer is still recovering from all of yesterday's publishing news reporting for you, so he only made a quick trip into the Catosphere today. Our speedy little kitty boy stopped in at The New Publishing Standard site. With just a little digging there he found a post about the Japanese company Rakuten.

Hmm ...Millions of library downloads.

According to Mark Williams, Rakuten is now the second largest dispenser of ebooks and audiobooks in Canada and the United States. Rakuten owns Canadian ebook publisher Kobo and United States library distributor OverDrive. Overdrive is a major supplier of ebooks and audiobooks to libraries for downloads by patrons. To illustrate this Mark Williams uses charts and data about the magnitude of reader ebook and audiobook downloads. The charts include numbers from not just sales downloads but downloads such as Kindle Unlimited as well. Included in the post are links to some of Mark Williams' previous posts about Rakuten and Overdrive.

Panzer says, "Hmm ... My ebooks are on OverDrive and Kobo."

Note: This is a huge post. Bring a thermos of tea and half a dozen muffins for today's reading selection.

To read the post tootle over to Rakuten