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
Charisse Jones / USA Today :
Context & Ripple Effects
The eBooks launch is the consumer-facing payoff of a partnership Walmart has been assembling with Rakuten all year: the two companies first agreed in January to sell Kobo e-readers and audiobooks in the US alongside a Japan online grocery service, and by December they extended the alliance so Walmart sells 1,200 US branded products on Rakuten Ichiba. Walmart eBooks — 6M+ titles plus a $9.99/month audiobook subscription — is the piece of that deal aimed squarely at Amazon's home turf of Kindle and Audible.
It also slots into a busy 2018 for Walmart's digital-services ambitions: reports in July had it weighing a subscription streaming video service priced under Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, and two months after this launch it committed to a $250M joint venture with interactive storytelling startup Eko — a pattern that later hardened into the Walmart+ membership program at $98 per year.
First-order effects
- Rakuten Kobo gains mass-market US distribution through Walmart's storefronts and site, while Walmart immediately fields a 6M+ title ebook catalog and an Audible-style $9.99/month audiobook subscription without building either from scratch.
Second-order effects
- Amazon's Kindle-Audible lock on digital reading faces its first serious big-box retail challenger, pressuring both on subscription pricing; the deeper Walmart-Rakuten tie-up also gives each side a beachhead in the other's home market.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, retailers stop treating media as merchandising and start bundling subscriptions into membership ecosystems — the path this coverage traces from ebooks and streaming experiments to Walmart+ as an umbrella offering.
The trend: Walmart is assembling a Rakuten-anchored digital services stack — ebooks, audiobooks, streaming, storytelling — to convert retail traffic into subscription relationships that compete with Amazon Prime.