Kobo takes eBooks social with Reading Life application

Kobo, the popular eReader, has decided to forge ahead and take on some social features. Readers can track personal reading histories, check-in with characters and places in books, and earn achievements and awards for simply reading. In addition to the extra features, readers can now share book information and favourite passages with people on Facebook.

The functionality will only be available for the iPad initially, but we did get word from Kobo that they plan on adding the functionality across their entire lineup.  They just don’t have any solid timelines yet on when we can expect that.

Here’s some information from the press release that stood out to me:

Users can track their reading life with interesting statistics, including how many books they’ve read, pages turned, how fast they read, and times of day they read. Statistics help users track their progress, earn awards, as well as discover and learn about their own reading styles and preferences.

I’m not the type of person who would share my reading material with friends, but I’d be interested to see my reading statistics. For that matter, this could also turn into a great teaching tool to track students’ reading skills.

You’ve got to give props to Kobo for trying to bring social features to eReaders, and hopefully they figure out a way to include this in their eReader lineup sooner rather than later.

The application is now available on the App Store.

We’ve been spending some time with the latest Kobo, and early indications are that it’s a hit.  We’ll have a deeper review available in the early New Year.

Kobo Introduces Reading Life from Kobo on Vimeo.