Kobo, part of Rakuten, is one of the world's largest ebook retailers — with a strong presence in Canada, the US, the UK, Australia, and across Europe. For independent publishers, it's one of the most direct routes to global ebook distribution. Kobo does not accept ONIX 2.1. Their ingestion system requires ONIX 3.0, and several fields that were optional before are now mandatory.
Based on Kobo's published metadata style guide. These fields must be present and correctly structured for a title to be ingested and activated:
Sales Rights is the single most common ingestion failure on Kobo. It is a mandatory composite — if it's absent, the metadata record fails entirely and the title does not appear in the catalogue.
Kobo accepts only three pairs of price type codes: 01/02, 03/04, or 41/42. Any other value will reject at ingestion. This catches publishers migrating from ONIX 2.1 where different codes were common.
Kobo rejects covers where the shorter side is under 1600 pixels. This is checked at the file level — a valid ONIX record with a non-compliant image URL will still fail to go live.
Sales Rights composites are required, not optional. Onix Creator structures them correctly in every generated file — they can't accidentally be left out.
Kobo's accepted price type codes are the only options in the pricing fields. You can't accidentally enter a code that Kobo rejects.
Upload an existing ONIX 2.1 file and Onix Creator converts it to a valid 3.0 structure with Kobo-compatible fields — including sales rights and pricing composites.
Start with 5 free exports. No credit card, no setup.