One out of 5 books sold in Canada is an e-book, according to Kobo CEO Michael Tamblyn, and in some categories e-books make up 1 out of 3 titles sold.
Tamblyn revealed this fact at a talk at The Economist’s Canada Summit in which he revealed how Kobo succeeded despite going up against the likes of Amazon and Apple. For him it boiled down to three things they did right. Medium has the scoop:
The second thing we did right was to let go of the gravitational pull of the US. in our first couple of years, we could already see that the US, the richest market for ebooks in the world, was about to become a battleground. It was the home turf of Amazon, Apple, Google, and Barnes & Noble, and everyone wants to win at home. So while our competitors were all engaged in a very expensive fight for control of the US market, we quickly and quietly expanded into every other single country that looked like a candidate for digital growth, places where we could get in early, start building brand and market share.