Kobo ereaders have really gained in popularity over the past few years, so much so that now even Amazon recommends buying them.
Being a direct competitor to Kindles, you’d think Amazon would put Kobo’s listings for their ereaders on the backburner, but that’s not the case at all. In fact, several of the Kobo listings on Amazon’s website have an “Amazon’s Choice” banner at the top of the page, as is the case with the Kobo Libra Colour.
According to Amazon, the Amazon’s Choice banner is there to highlight highly rated, well-priced products available to ship immediately. I don’t know the requirements to get an Amazon’s Choice banner, but there are a bunch of products with higher customer ratings that are also available to ship now that don’t have the banner.
There’s a FAQ page on Amazon’s website about Amazon’s Choice. The first thing it says is, “Amazon’s Choice makes it easy to discover products that other customers frequently choose for similar shopping needs.” It goes on to say this: “They are also, on average, delivered faster and returned less frequently than alternative products. Amazon’s Choice highlights products we think customers may like, and customers can always shop from the vast selection of products available in our store.”
The banner doesn’t appear on the listing pages for most other brands of ereaders on Amazon’s website. All the Kindles have it, of course, but none of the Onyx or Bigme listings have it. I did find one PocketBook listings with it, but most don’t have it. The PocketBook Verse Pro Color somehow managed to get the banner, and it has a lower rating than Kobos at 4.0 stars.
There was a time when the only ebook readers you could buy from Amazon were Kindles. That time has long passed. Now they don’t care what you buy from them as long as they’re getting paid to be a middleman. They’ll even recommend products that directly compete with their own products.
Not really funny or surprising at all. Amazon and all the other tech companies spent the entire summer laying off tens of thousands of employees to replace them with AI bot algos and H1Bs, so the banners are likely completely automated at this point, and there’s no one left to ‘curate’ the listings. And even if there are a few overworked, probably non-English speaking/literate, employees looking it over, the likelihood of anyone making manual changes are extremely low barring some kind of glitch like adult toys showing up on the main page or promotional banners.