On the brink of shuttering the e-book retailer Blinkbox Books, parent company and U.K. retail giant Tesco has reached an agreement with e-book retailer Kobo to take over operations of the company.
The deal was first reported by the tech blog Good E-Reader. Tesco acquired Blinkbox, at the time called Mobcast, for $7.2 million in 2012 in an effort to enter the e-book retail market. Blinkbox is said to offer about 150,000 titles for sale. However, since the 2012 acquisition, Tesco has made moves to get out of both e-book retail and music streaming. At one point Tesco was negotiating with Waterstones to acquire Blinkbox but the negotiations failed and Tesco was set to shut the service down.
However, according to Good E-Reader, Blinkbox users will now be able to convert their memberships to Kobo and move older purchases to new Kobo accounts. The Blinkbox Book apps will be discontinued once a majority of its former customers have moved their accounts to Kobo.
