this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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I bought my daughter a Kobo years ago and it has worked great. This was before Walmart bought them and they were much harder to find in the US but Kindle was requiring my daughter to have an Amazon account to check out library books. In order to have an Amazon account you must have a credit card attached. Tech support's solution for me was to just give her a pre paid card. They didn't understand why I wasn't interested in forcing my 7 year old into Amazon in order to check out library books.
Kobo has Overdrive installed in the device. You can also load PDF files directly onto it. I don't know if they've changed that over the years but her device is now 7 years old and working great.
Walmart didn't buy Kobo, although they did/do own a small share of Rakuten, Kobo's parent company.
In 2018, in an attempt to keep up with Amazon, Walmart partnered with Kobo to sell ebooks and Kobo devices in Walmart stores and online, and I believe that devices purchased from Walmart had the Walmart logo when they booted up, and I think the Kobo site in the US also had Walmart branding, but Kobo was then and is now a Canadian company fully owned by a Japanese company.
Good to know. I was worried that Walmart would screw up the PDF capabilities, among other things.