Watch out, Amazon: the Kobo eReader now has a Goodreads rival

Another challenge to the Amazon Kindle-Goodreads book tracking empire has emerged. On Monday, the reading tracker StoryGraph teamed up with Rakuten’s Kobo , the maker of a more open eReader (and Kindle alternative), allowing book lovers to automatically track their reading habits. The integration was first announced in May, and is now live for all Kobo account-based content. This makes the Kobo the first eReader to integrate with StoryGraph’s book community platform, and serves as another way to chip away at Amazon’s dominance in the digital books market. Traditionally, Amazon has managed to retain its readers by offering low prices on books and ebooks and combining that with a robust online reading community and social network, Goodreads. While many Goodreads competitors emerged over the years, few have been able to establish a solid footprint because they lacked the ability to integrate with customers’ e-reading devices, as Goodreads does with Kindle devices. The StoryGraph-Kobo integration changes that, as it will now automatically sync a user’s reading progress with their StoryGraph account. That means when you finish a book on your Kobo eReader, it will automatically be marked as “Read” on StoryGraph, keeping your reading stats up-to-date. The feature will work with both ebooks and audiobooks, the companies said, and it works with any Kobo device and Kobo’s apps. …