Kobo is sending out emails to customers with a message from their CEO, and he says that Kobo is working on some new “projects” that they plan to unveil later this year.
Some people think it’s a sign of new Kobo devices coming soon, and others think it’s going to be some new AI-related features.
The latter is more likely given the wording of the email:
“I’m excited about where we’re headed. We have some amazing projects that should be ready to share with you in the second half of the year—developments that will fundamentally change how we read and write on our devices. We’re going to keep pushing at the edges of what reading can be.”
Reading into that last part, it’s hard not to think it’s AI, especially with Amazon rolling out several new AI features for Kindles in recent months. The logical move for Kobo would be to add something like Amazon’s Story So Far feature that gives summaries of books up to the point you’ve read without spoilers—it’s actually pretty useful when it’s available, but not a lot of books support it yet.
Amazon also recently added AI-powered search and summaries for notebooks on Kindle Scribes, and Kobo’s notebook app hasn’t seen any meaningful updates in a long while, so they could be working on some AI notebook features too.
Either way, a new Kobo device is unlikely to “fundamentally change how we read and write on our devices”. It’s gotta be AI. That’s where everything is headed. And it makes you wonder if that email was written by AI. There are three consecutive paragraphs with em dashes—not a good sign. 😀
This is similar to how Kobo’s CEO posted on social media last year about a new little hardware surprise coming soon, and it ended up being the Kobo Remote page turner. Whatever it is, this is an easy way to get some attention and build hype for future developments.
What projects do you hope Kobo is working on for the second half of this year?
I am going to squirrel away a few dollars. My guess, a color note/reader device. HOPEFULLY a black and white variant also.
Ellipsa replacement/upgrade is long overdue. I actually would like to see a device between 8 and 9 inches for reading, but expect that most companies won’t go below 10 inches on a “flagship” note.
An 8 inch ereader would be great. I have a 7.8 inch PocketBook that is my favorite readers.
Yay! A new AI gimmick with hopefully a subscription too.
Good times we are living in.
The irony of this being posted by someone named Claude is not lost on me.
This doesn’t sound like a highly anticipated e-reader is on the way. Or any hardware at all.
FCC shows nothing yet. So my guess would be some kind of service related to the Kobo store and/or some kind of firmware changes on the newer MTK based models (Libra/Clara Colour, Clara BW, Elipsa 2E).
LLMs were trained on fanfiction, where em-dashes are prevalent. However, they will take the em-dashes from my cold, dead hands.
We don’t need another AI thing. It feels like AI is being shoved down our throats. It’s, like, “See how amazing this is? NOTICE HOW AMAZING IT IS. YOU MUST LOVE IT.”
Totally agree with you. I feel like AI is being forced on us whether we want it or not. Give me a nice screened, lightweight, front light/warm, 300 ppi dumb device to read on.
I agree with other comments here. I don’t find any AI-related news about ereaders exciting. Unless they give us a new high-quality device with an excellent screen, I have 0 interest.
I really don’t like where Kobo is heading. All they do is ignore what their users ask for and push whatever their marketing team likes. Send to Kobo would change how I read on my Kobo, nothing else is needed.
This exactly. Send to Kobo, even as a low priced subscription, is probably their most ignored feature.
May be right about AI. I don’t object to AI….subscriptions are another thing altogether…unwanted.
I do think there is a decent chance for a device or 2
Unless it’s a Sage 2, and in black-and-white, I’m probably not interested. I can’t see any need to add AI crud to my reading, as I’ve gotten along fine without such for some 60+ years.
No real interest in subscription services. Even a “Send to Kobo” service wouldn’t do much for me, since I send my books via Dropbox very happily. I do little annotating, and I don’t read with the Kobo app, so I have little need for sync services.
The UI feature I would like is a toggle to allow me to CHOOSE whether I want to read an epub in the Adobe RMSDK engine or the Kobo kepub engine.