Kobo is aiming to give its ebook store a much needed burst of speed after linking up with content delivery network Hibernia.
The new deal should mean faster browsing and downloading from the Kobo store and, I hope, a smoother and quicker way of working for self-publishers using the Kobo Writing Life service, which has a good looking interface but can be flaky at times.
For those of you who are technically inclined, a content delivery network (CDN) is just really a lot of computers (or servers as the parlance has it) situated around the world to serve up web pages at a faster rate than if you had fewer computers serving up the content, simple really. The system is also able to deal with traffic spikes which could slow down or crash a site.
In fact, this very website has the distinction of being delivered by a CDN (it’s meant to make it faster than 80% of all other sites on the web).
Hibernia was set up in 2003 and has a specialism in delivering video on demand, which does make me wonder whether Kobo might be planning some sort of Netflix-type operation.
Amazon, of course, has small cities of server farms which cover the bookstore as well as its other many and varied sectors. The firm has its own CloudFront CDN and has a fast-growing business in providing CDN and other cloud services to many major websites.