Kobo in Conversation

Hosts Michael Tamblyn and Nathan Maharaj caught up on a landmark legal decision about books and AI, the perils of bookstore merch, plus a whole lot more. This episode covers: Anthropic AI v. Authors and Authors v. Apple How Powell's Books' new mugs got them into hot water Barnes & Noble buying Books Inc. C-suite change

Michael Tamblyn spoke with journalist Brian Stewart, whose career spanned decades, covering the US-Iraq Gulf War, famine in Ethiopia, and countless other historical events for CBC and NBC. He tells us about all of it—including what was going on in his life off-camera—in a new book: On the Ground: My Life as a Foreign C

Host Nathan Maharaj spoke with Antonio Michael Downing, author of the 2021 memoir Saga Boy: My Life of Blackness and Becoming, as well as the illustrated children’s book Stars in My Crown. For just about a year now he’s also been the host of CBC’s The Next Chapter, where every week he talks to authors (and once in a wh

Host Michael Tamblyn spoke with novelist Scott Alexander Howard, winner of the 2025 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and author of The Other Valley. It’s the story of Odile Ozanne, a young girl who lives in a small village in a valley. In the next valley over, in the west, there is an identical village where events from 20 y

Host Nathan Maharaj spoke with novelist Rob Franklin. His debut novel Great Black Hope is about a young man, named Smith, who gets arrested for cocaine possession on his way home from a party at the end of an oppressively hot New York summer. Smith is Black, and he’s queer; he’s also a Stanford graduate and his family

This past spring Kobo held an event for employees called KoboCon. It was an opportunity for the staff of Kobo to share interesting things they're working on and some big ideas they're grappling with. One of those big ideas was how the information ecosystem affects readers, writers, and individuals coming together at wo