E-book retailer Kobo is expanding the functionality of Reading Life, the social media reading platform in the Kobo app, with Kobo Pulse, a new feature that allows readers see and engage in a whole range of social activity and commentary on every page of the book they’re reading.
Kobo Pulse is integrated into the Kobo app in-book reading experience and appears as a glowing semi-circle at the bottom of any page the user is reading. The Kobo Pulse icon expands and contracts—the more activity, the larger its animated expansion—in proportion to the amount of social activity taking place on the page. Kobo Pulse allows anyone using the Kobo app to add comments about the page of the book in question, share passages, see who is commenting, share comments on Facebook and more. The Kobo Pulse is also integrated into Reading Life, a Kobo social reading platform that collects and displays your personal reading statistics in a series of lively graphs and charts—data like time spent reading, how fast you read, how many pages read, what your Kobo friends are reading, funny achievement badges and awards and much more.
The feature comes out of Facebook’s F8 Conference, held last week to announce a variety of new features for Facebook, including a deeper integration of Kobo’s functionality into the Facebook interface.
Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis said, "We're moving into an era where social eReading will change the nature of how and what we read. With Kobo Pulse, readers can get more out of reading. Books are now alive. The end is no longer the end. Readers get to participate, adding their voice, which actually lives within the reading experience itself through Pulse."
