Kobo e-reader Walmart deal

So, everyone I know in person has heard of the Kindle and the Nook. Nobody's heard of the Kobo (though it wouldn't surprise me if people on the forums have).

https://news.walmart.com/2018/08/22...s-including-an-audiobook-subscription-for-999

Walmart has inked a partnership with Kobo to sell readers and ebooks in the stores. In addition, I've discovered, you can make your e-books available through Overdrive--the service that public libraries use to buy e-books. I'd tried to get into Overdrive 2 years ago and was rejected. They prefer to work with publishing houses and not individuals unless they're big-name or have lots of titles.

This has the potential to be pretty big for indie authors. So, I've been converting all of my books to put on the Kobo indie publishing platform. I say re-converting, because every freaking site has a slightly different definition of what makes an acceptable epub file. And getting into overdrive requires a very stringent set of rules. So, I spent a good couple hours passing my epubs through the same validator Overdrive uses and tweaking until I got a clean bill of health.

Thought some of our other authors on the forum might be interested in knowing about it. The Kobo author site is: https://writinglife.kobobooks.com and I'd be happy to walk/talk someone through the necessary hoops you have to jump through to get your epub file Overdrive compatible.
 
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First I've heard of it. I knew the Waltons had their own proprietary ebooks, but I didn't know they had audiobooks.

--Patrick
 
I'd heard of the Kobo back in 2011 when I was putting my books on SmashWords--they listed all of the readers they were compatible with. At the time, the Kobo had like 20% of the admittedly small e-reader market, so I was happy that SmashWords would make my book available in that market.

By 2013 and with the Kindle's dominance, they had dropped to 3% market share, and I wasn't selling anything via SmashWords, so I dropped my books out of distribution through them and really hadn't worried that much about making my books available on the platform.
 
Thought I'd follow up on this, since a year has passed.
I had completely forgotten I'd put books on this platform, and I haven't noticed any payments to remind me that I had.

So, I logged in and checked my sales. Zero sales. Can't say as I was surprised, as Amazon has the ebook market pretty locked up. But I was hopeful.
 
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