Watch out Kindle and Nook, The Kobo Aura is coming for you!

The New Aura From Kobo

Just don’t tell that to Kobo, which continues to push the boundaries on the lowly e-reader. The company has just announced the Kobo Aura, a $150 e-reader with some fancy technologies for reading digital books.

While Barnes & Noble plays ambivalent about the future of the Nook and Amazon continues to dominate the e-reader industry, Canadian firm Kobo is opting for their own strategy: Lightweight e-readers with more bells and whistles than the Kindle.

The conventional wisdom about e-readers is that they are slowly getting pushed to the bargain bin, doomed to a life of obscurity at the hands of thinner, lighter and cheaper tablets but Kobo is hoping to prove the naysayers wrong.

The company launched their Aura e-reader earlier this week; the device has a 6″ HD electronic ink screen and weighs under 175 grams. It retails for $150 and has more than a month of battery time. Say what? More than a month of battery Time? Love it! And that’s not the only thing that the Kobo Aura boasts, making it stand out from the rest of the e-reader pack. Among other things, there’s fonts for dyslexic readers and a better backlight capability than other e-ink products. But for Kobo, the question is how they will be able to undercut the much cheaper e-reader prices of Amazon.

In an interview with Fast Company, CEO Michael Serbinis emphasized that the international market was a major growth area for his company. Kobo is based in Canada and backed financially by Japanese giant Rakuten. Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble have disproportionately focused on the domestic market for e-book readers, and many foreign markets are dominated by homegrown e-reader products without international reach. For Kobo, Europe, Asia, and Latin America might just be the biggest markets for their new e-reader. Besides the Aura, the company announced several other readers and tablets this week.

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