Walmart partners with Rakuten Kobo to launch Walmart eBooks, with a catalog of 6M+ titles and a $9.99/month Audible-like subscription service for audiobooks
Walmart ratcheted up its battle with Amazon, planting a stake on the e-commerce giant's turf by selling e-books for the first time.
Context & Ripple Effects
This launch is the US consumer-facing payoff of a deal struck earlier in the year: in January, Walmart and Rakuten agreed to sell Kobo's e-readers and audiobooks stateside while opening a Rakuten-powered online grocery service in Japan. Today's Walmart eBooks storefront turns that supply agreement into a branded catalog of 6M+ titles with a $9.99/month audiobook subscription.
It also slots into a busy 2018 for Walmart's digital-services push — reports of a price-undercutting subscription streaming video service surfaced in July, and an interactive-storytelling joint venture with Eko followed in October — all aimed squarely at Amazon's playbook of using content to lock in shoppers.
First-order effects
- Amazon faces its first serious US retail rival in e-books, where Kindle and Audible have effectively owned the market; Kobo gains a mass-market storefront it could never build alone.
Second-order effects
- A $9.99/month flat-rate audiobook subscription undercuts Audible's credit-based model on simplicity, pressuring Amazon to defend audiobook pricing or sweeten its own bundle.
- The catalog gives Walmart a content asset to fold into future membership offers — groundwork that later shows up in Walmart+'s subscription strategy.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, big-box retail competition shifts from merchandise margins to subscription ecosystems, where content libraries are the retention mechanism and partnerships (Rakuten, Eko) substitute for building studios in-house.
The trend: Walmart is assembling a Rakuten-backed content-and-subscriptions stack to counter Amazon's Prime flywheel rather than competing only on store shelves.