Rakuten Kobo has quietly adjusted its long-running Price Match Guarantee, removing a financial advantage that digital readers have relied on for years to save money on e-books and audiobooks.
What is the Kobo Price Match Guarantee?
The program was first introduced in 2016
For Kobo users in major regional markets—including Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and certain areas of Europe, the Kobo Price Match Guarantee is a little-known tip that’s great for keeping the ebook market competitively low. It let customers who purchased digital content directly from Kobo request store credit if they found the exact same title being sold at a lower price on an authorized competitor’s platform.
To immediately quash any fears — the Kobo Price Match Guarantee isn’t going anywhere, at least not yet. But it is getting slightly worse. Previously, Kobo gave an additional 10% discount on top of the competitor’s rate, along with a refund of the difference. The website read: “Kobo offers a Price Match Guarantee. If you find the same eBook on another website for a lower price, we’ll credit you the difference plus an extra 10%!”
However, automated emails sent to users filing recent claims—alongside widespread discussions across dedicated e-reader communities like Reddit—reveal that the company has officially changed its policy. That line is no longer on the website, suggesting that Kobo has updated its official help pages to say the guarantee will now match only the verified competitor’s base price.
7/10
- Brand
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Rakuten
- Screen
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E Ink Carta 1200 Touchscreen
- Resolution
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227 PPI
- Storage
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32GB
This is an issue because, while it doesn’t sound like much, that 10% helped offset local sales taxes. Because digital storefront rules and store-issued credits usually fail to account for the sales tax applied to an initial higher purchase price, that extra 10% margin was previously useful in closing the financial gap. Moving forward, customers who must pay standard digital sales tax on the original list price will see a slight decrease in their total savings.
Now, it’s not the end of the world, but it is something that was working, at least for the customers, and is a net negative change. The policy change has naturally sparked debate among committed e-reader fans on r/kobo. Some members of the community believe the bonus simply became too popular to sustain indefinitely, like VIP from back in the day. It certainly is a shame how perks seem to scale back perks as their user bases grow.
But even though losing the extra bonus margin is disappointing, the general attitude across various reader forums leans toward pragmatism rather than anger, and I have to say, I tend to agree.
It is certainly a shame to lose the extra cash, but the reality is that most price-match requests are for books already reduced to impulse-buy levels—such as titles dropping below $5. As long as the core price-match system remains active, dependable, and consistently upheld by customer support staff, many users feel that trading a few pennies of bonus credit for a reliable baseline refund system is a fair trade.