This was an opportune time because in 2009 digital book sales were up 176% and in 2010 were expected to top $500 million in the U.S. Michael Serbinis had grander ambitions for Shortcovers and wanted to spin it away from Indigo and create Kobo. Less than year after Short Covers went live it provided eBooks to customers in over 200 countries who have downloaded its reader application over 1 million times online and through devices including smartphones, desktops and popular e-readers like the Sony Reader. Shortcovers was launched in 2009 and Indigo completely financed the development of an app for Android and the iPhone to read e-books. After a few years of meetings and going back and forth, Short Covers was going to be a reality. He constantly pitched the idea to management. Serbinis started to lobby Indigo about getting involved in the seachange of e-books very early on. He founded and was CEO of supply-chain agency BookNet Canada and the co-founder of Bookshelf.ca, Canada’s first online bookstore, which was acquired by Indigo Books and Music in 1998. Michael Tamblyn played a major role at Short Covers and was hired by Serbinis in 2009. He returned to Canada in 2006 and joined Indigo Books and Music. Over this period he obtained a master’s degree in engineering and a few patents. He founded it in 1997, and went on to sell it to CriticalPath in 1999, for whom he was CTO and EVP marketing for some time. The first company he started, DocSpace, was an internet leader in security. Michael Serbinis was the brainchild behind Short Covers and eventually Kobo. The future is bright for Kobo and they continue to release two new e-readers every single year. They quickly took over the Canadian market and started to expand into foreign countries in a really intelligent way. The company burst onto the scene in 2009 in Toronto, Canada. Kobo is the second largest e-reader and ebook retailer in the world.
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