Revolutionizing the eReader with Ramesh Mantha, Rakuten Kobo

Upon its debut, the eReader reworked the studying expertise by permitting bookworms to hold a complete library within the palm of their hand. But when innovation is on the coronary heart of what you do, transferring the needle doesn’t finish there.

“Innovation has never been an end goal for us,” says Ramesh Mantha, senior vp of product administration at Rakuten Kobo Inc. “It’s all about learning and enhancing how people experience books.”

Since becoming a member of Kobo twelve years in the past, Mantha has utilized his background in electrical engineering to merge each {hardware} and software program growth at Kobo. He’s witnessed the Canadian tech firm’s ingenious strides and has overseen a few of its most compelling product developments, together with the Aura H2O, one of many first waterproof eReaders; the Clara 2E, the corporate’s first eReader constructed with recycled and ocean-bound plastics; and, most just lately, the Elipsa 2E, enabling readers to jot down straight onto books.

“At Kobo, we have agility, speed and the hunger to innovate, which is why we were the first company to market note-taking abilities on an eReader,” says Mantha. “This scrappier mentality comes from being the eReader underdog in a world with enormous global competitors.”

In dialog with Canadian Business, Mantha shares the developments he’s witnessed within the eReader house, shoppers’ evolving wants and the transformative energy behind Kobo’s newest launch designed for giant thinkers.

How have you ever witnessed the eReader house evolve since becoming a member of Rakuten Kobo Inc.?

The most noticeable evolution has been innovation within the class. In the early days, eReaders have been barely distinguishable, with the identical screens and options, and a race to get to the bottom potential value level. In 2013, Kobo determined to buck this development and check out one thing completely different: a extra premium, bigger display, high-resolution eReader with the Aura HD. It prompted Kobo on a journey of innovation, singularly targeted on a greater studying expertise. More just lately, with the Elipsa, we launched the primary eReader with the flexibility to jot down straight onto your e-book.

Was note-taking a pure evolution for Kobo?

For nonfiction lovers, eBooks haven’t been their medium of alternative because of the lack of ability to annotate concepts subsequent to key passages. Understanding this, incorporating note-taking and highlighting functionalities into our units made good sense.

How do you keep within the know in terms of readers’ evolving wants?

Our number of groups work concurrently to establish these adjustments. Kobo’s person expertise and analysis group, for instance, stories their market findings via buyer surveys and gross sales knowledge on to the {hardware} growth group, and so they translate these findings into motion. The knowledge we acquire doesn’t reside in isolation; it permits us to higher perceive our customers and work out methods to clear up the issues they’re dealing with. We’re motivated by a shared objective to make one’s studying expertise higher.

What differentiates the Elipsa 2E from different eReaders?

Our objective with Elipsa 2E was to construct a tool that may be the centre of your journey to know a brand new matter. Central to this are each the books you learn and the notebooks you write on. Within books, the reader can write straight onto the web page of the e-book, circling phrases and writing within the margins. With notebooks, we acknowledged that when individuals have massive handwritten notebooks filled with concepts, looking for textual content is a vital function. You can search inside handwritten notebooks and convert handwriting to textual content as wanted. The Elipsa 2E additionally has doc enhancing capabilities the place handwriting could be transformed to textual content, drawings or diagrams, and exported as a Word doc or PDF.

How do you envision the Elipsa 2E altering the studying expertise for Canadians?

The Kobo Elipsa 2E permits for additional engagement with concepts because of the brand new markup and spotlight options made potential by the newly designed stylus. This transforms the whole studying expertise as readers can now concurrently seize their ideas whereas studying. Canadians that beforehand most popular print books because of their potential to be marked up might now take into account making the swap to eBooks. We take into account it a game-changer.