Tokyo shoppers consider e-reader options: Rakuten’s Kobo and Amazon’s Kindle.Credit...Ko Sasaki for The New York Times TOKYO — When Rakuten, Japan’s leading e-commerce company, introduced its Kobo e-reader in Japan in July 2012, the company’s chief executive, Hiroshi Mikitani, presented a gift to Yoshinobu Noma, the president of Kodansha, Japan’s largest publisher. It was a T-shirt emblazoned with
![Japan’s E-Reader Industry Struggles to Keep Up as Amazon Takes the Lead (Published 2013)](https://cdn-ak-scissors.b.st-hatena.com/image/square/03aa96395c00113e75b4532054c3a4de161d6d36/height=288;version=1;width=512/https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%2Fimages%2F2013%2F09%2F02%2Fbusiness%2FKOBO-01%2FKOBO-01-articleLarge.jpg%3Fyear%3D2013%26h%3D391%26w%3D600%26s%3D53ad5a96f68401e2551c6036a18bce5ead628e05cc46e34139521edfa3c38a6a%26k%3DZQJBKqZ0VN)