The Digital Reader

RIM are throwing a developers conference right this week for the Blackberry. It just kicked off in San Francisco today. Apparently Kobo are at the conference and they just accidentally announced their new social networking features. Here’s the blog post (they didn’t take it down quite fast enough):

Today, Kobo begins to bring its social reading vision to life.

Just moments ago, we were on stage at BlackBerry DEVCON, RIM’s developer conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco where we unveiled an industry-first social eReading experience.

Kobo will be the first eReading service integrating BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) into its app – making eReading social, and real-time! This will also make eReading with Kobo a ton of fun! Below is a video of our app, which will be generally available early next year. Shop with a friend, read with a group, exchange passages, and discuss the book in real-time. I’m really excited about this.

There’s also a video on Vimeo, but it’s locked under a password at the moment.

So if I’m reading this right, Kobo plan to add support for BBM to all their reading apps. Now, that was clever. Of all the ways to add social networking, this is one I’d never have thought of.

Update: Kobo activated the blog post. Here’s the video:

BBM with Kobo from Kobo on Vimeo.

Second Update: Mike Cane tipped me to this Playbook preview video on Youtube. You can see the Kobo app at about 1:22: