Kobo and the utilisation of paid third-party services

Kobo's reliance on third-party services is not a substitute for developing a productivity toolkit.

Kobo relies on third-party paid services to offer features like cloud storage and saving articles from the web. For cloud storage, Kobo utilises Dropbox and Google Drive for some of its devices (Kobo Forma, Kobo Sage, Kobo Elipsa, and Kobo Elipsa 2E). Reading saved articles is possible through Mozilla's Pocket.

Both Dropbox and Google Drive are paid services. Dropbox's free storage allows only 2 GB, but Google Drive's free storage limit is a more generous 15 GB. The syncing service is restricted, with personal documents stored in the cloud only being downloadable. Kobo Sage, Elipsa, and Elipsa 2E support extra features, like syncing annotated PDFs and notebooks.

Similarly, Pocket is a paid service. In the Android application, a free account only allows three highlights for a stored article. The option to highlight is not available on Kobo devices.

Kobo needs to build its feature toolkit.

Like Amazon, Kobo is foremost interested in selling content. Yet, unlike Amazon, there is an absence of a well-developed toolkit to enhance an e-reader's features, which means resorting to third-party paid services with restrictions.

Tolino – Kobo's partner, also owned by Rakuten – has a cloud service to store and categorise personal documents. The Tolino Cloud has a 25GB storage limit. The service supports extensive syncing services for both purchased and personal ebooks.

Instead of Pocket, Kobo can develop its version of the feature (e.g., an enhanced version of Send-to-Kindle). Archived articles do not require much cloud storage and can be amalgamated into a Kobo cloud service. 

The issue of expanding the productivity toolkit is made more pressing with Kobo releasing e-notes. Interacting with a text requires tools that Kobo does not support (Kobo's PDF software is barebones with, for example, poor optimisation, no contrast adjustment, and no ability to select text to highlight).

Kobo does support the cloud storage of notebooks, but the feature does not extend to ebooks and PDFs (PDFs can be synced to Dropbox or Google Drive). With personal ebooks, Kobo only supports the wireless transfer of the document to local storage from Dropbox or Google Drive – there is no syncing of personal ebooks across devices. For advanced features, Onyx BOOX's performance and software features make it the best pick for most users who want an all-around reading and productivity user experience.