Kobo, Readmoo, and Taiwan's Traditional Chinese Ebook Market
When Rakuten Kobo launched its ebook store in Taiwan in September 2016, its own focus groups discovered something remarkable: many Taiwanese consumers thought buying an ebook meant receiving a PDF file by post. Fewer than 20% understood how digital books actually worked. The catalogue had just 9,000 Chinese-language titles. There was no hardware. The interface wasn’t even in Chinese.
Eight years later, Kobo commands over 60% of Taiwan’s eReader market, serves more than 750,000 members, and offers a catalogue exceeding 200,000 Traditional Chinese titles alongside seven million foreign-language books.
That’s not a growth story. That’s a market that was built from scratch.
Why Taiwan Matters Even If You’ve Never Published There
If you’re an indie author from the US or thereabouts, Taiwan probably isn’t on your radar. It shouldn’t be surprising — the island has 23 million people. However, here’s the number that should get your attention: Taiwan publishes roughly 40,000 new titles per year, giving it the second-highest per-capita publication rate in the world after the United Kingdom. The readers are there. They always were. What was missing — until very recently — was the digital infrastructure to reach them.
Think of it like the early Kindle years in the US, except compressed into a much shorter timeline. When Kobo arrived, only about 15% of the top 100 print bestsellers had a digital edition. Within fifteen months, Kobo had grown its Chinese catalogue from 9,000 to 50,000 titles, partnering with twelve foundational publishers including Cite, Yuan Liou, and Linking. By early 2019 — less than two and a half years after launch — it had claimed the number-one position.
Three Platforms, Three Bets
The competitive picture is a genuine three-way race, and each platform is making a different bet.
Readmoo leads in Traditional Chinese catalogue depth — over 370,000 titles — and has the strongest reading community features. If you want deep TC-native curation, Readmoo is where the conversation happens.
Books.com.tw has the largest overall member base by far, backed by PChome’s e-commerce empire, and just launched its own eReader hardware at TIBE 2025.
Kobo’s edge is global breadth and the Kobo Plus subscription availability.
Out of these three, two — Kobo and Readmoo — have dedicated self-publishing platforms (KWL and mooPub, respectively).
The Subscription Gap Nobody’s Talking About
Kobo launched its Plus subscription service simultaneously in Taiwan and Hong Kong in February 2024, at NT$199 per month. Singapore and Malaysia followed in March 2025, each already home to hundreds of thousands of existing Kobo members — many of them Chinese-reading.
Here’s where it gets interesting for publishers. Kobo Plus globally contains roughly two million titles. Of those, approximately 10,000 are Traditional Chinese.
Ten thousand out of two million. That’s 0.5%.
We don’t have exact subscriber counts for Taiwan — Kobo hasn’t disclosed them — but what we do know is that Taiwan’s GM described the subscriber base as “doubling annually” since launch. The readers are arriving. The shelves, relatively speaking, are empty.
What This Means
Remember those focus groups from 2016 — the ones where people thought an ebook was a PDF sent by post? That market now has 750,000 active Kobo members, a subscription service growing at double-digit rates, and a supply gap in its fastest-growing channel that mirrors the one Kobo exploited when it first arrived.
The window won’t stay open indefinitely. Taiwan’s ebook new-title volume nearly doubled year-over-year in Q4 2025, and native publishers are professionalising fast. But right now, in most genre categories inside Kobo Plus, a publisher entering the Traditional Chinese market is competing against very few authors.
That’s not a guarantee. But it is an unusual amount of thin air.
by Anastasia Rydaeva
Cowper Author Services - Editing and Marketing for international translations (English, German, French, Dutch, Italian and Spanish)