Back in May, Mozilla announced their decision to shut down Pocket, which they went through with on July 8th, leaving Kobo users without any official way to send web articles to Kobo devices.
Pocket support was one of the selling points for Kobo ereaders, and Pocket was something that other brands didn’t have built-in. But now Kobo ereaders are without Pocket support too, and Kobo has not provided any alternatives.
Some people have switched to using Instapaper or Wallabag, but those alternatives aren’t integrated with Kobo’s software like Pocket was so the process isn’t as streamlined, especially with Kobo lacking any kind of Send-To-Kobo service to send articles and ebooks to Kobo devices.
Kobo’s CEO has been making promises on social media about a solution to the Pocket closure coming soon, but it sounds like there’s a good chance it will be a subscription or paid service.
The thing about Kobo that most people seem to forget is they’re just a small company that sells ebooks and audiobooks, along with a few ereaders. They don’t sell other products and run web services like Amazon. Offering a service similar to Pocket is out of their wheelhouse, and it isn’t something they can easily throw together like some other companies could (that’s why they relied on Pocket to do the heavy lifting).
It’s gotten to the point where Kobo rarely even updates the software on their ereaders anymore (most of their devices haven’t been updated since last October) so it’s not like they have an active team of software developers that can work on putting together a new article clipping service in short order. You’d think Rakuten could jump in and help with that kind of stuff, but they don’t seem to do much of anything when it comes to Kobo’s business.
To Kobo’s credit, at least they’ve removed all mention of Kobo ereaders supporting Pocket for web articles on the product pages of their website. It’s a shame they couldn’t come up with an alternative before the cutoff date, but maybe they’re working on something now.
What is Rakuten’s interest in Kobo? I am amazed that Rakuten’s management sits idle, when Kobo doesn’t have any B&W readers in the 7-8” range to sell. Meanwhile, new Libra 2s are selling for north of $300 on EBay, when available.
I so rarely used Pocket, I’m not going to miss it.
I feel badly for those who bought their Kobo devices primarily because of the Pocket integration though. I certainly hope Kobo comes up with something for those folks, but I suspect it’s not a high priority, because it’s probably a fairly small number of customers who make heavy use of the feature.
If they were going to offer something to keep the MOST customers happy, it would be reading position and annotation sync for side-loaded content. And they haven’t done THAT, so it might be advised for Pocket fans to find alternate ways to get their articles to their readers rather than rely on Kobo to provide a solution any time soon.
I was a heavy pocket user on Kobo…articles were easy to save for later and pleasant to read. Probably will not be replaced.