What Content is Not Allowed?
Kobo reserves the right to remove Audiobooks and eBooks that contain the following, but is not limited to:
- Low Quality or Lacking Original Value: Derivative content that floods a particular niche without offering a distinct voice, original research, or significant creative effort.
- Poorly Formatted or Unreadable Content: Books with significant formatting issues, garbled text, missing chapters, or other errors that make them unreadable or significantly detract from the reading experience. This also includes content with insufficient original textual material (e.g., journals, notebooks, planners, or workbooks), as well as any works that display a general lack of content, editing, quality, or professionalism.
- Misleading Metadata: Using titles, subtitles, cover art, descriptions, author/pen names, categories, or keywords that are intentionally deceptive or misleading about the book's content, genre, or authorship.
- Automated Content Generation: Content generated primarily by automated tools that lacks genuine human effort, quality control, or is designed to exploit trends rather than offer genuine reader value.
- Private Label Rights (PLR) Content
- Duplicate Content: Publishing the exact same content multiple times under different titles, authors, or editions without significant, justifiable changes.
- Companion novels (study guides, summaries, workbooks, etc.)
- Fanfiction
- Public Domain
- Content that includes information that is widely available for free
- Keyword Stuffing: Employing an excessive number of keywords in titles, subtitles, descriptions, or metadata.
- Content primarily containing advertising/links to other businesses.
Kobo reserves the right to remove content that goes against our content policy:
- Pornographic, pedophilic, or obscene content including: incest, bestiality, exploitation, sexual violence, or force
- Child pornography
- Commercial pornography
- Hateful content: content that promotes hate toward groups based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, or sexual orientation/gender identity
- Violent content: direct threats of violence against any person or group of people; nor instructional material on creating, modifying or deploying weapons.
- Private and confidential information: content including personally identifiable information about individuals
- Impersonation
- Unauthorized commercial activity
- Unlawful use of Kobo's Service
- Spam, malicious codes, and viruses
- Copyrighted material
For more detailed information, please the Rakuten Kobo Content Policy
Copyright guidelines
- Users must own the digital publishing rights to all content uploaded for sale to the Kobo Store.
- If you are also a traditionally published author, and you are unsure as to which rights you own, please consult your publisher or attorney.
- If you are using Kobo Writing Life as a publisher or aggregator, you must have legal consent from the content owners before you can distribute their books.
Erotic Content
If you are publishing erotic content, please be advised of the following:
- Erotic content must be correctly categorized as Erotica. You can find Erotica category codes under our Romance category.
- We no longer accept erotic photography books.
- Explicit erotic content (hentai/cartoon/illustration) cannot be sold in Japan so please ensure you deselect Japan when selecting sales territories.
- Do not include explicit content in your description or cover image.