As announced in TechCrunch today, Japanese e-commerce site Rakuten just acquired Canadian e-reading company Kobo for $315 million. With rumors of Amazon launching a Kindle store in Japan, Rakuten being the leader of the Japanese e-commerce market, and Kobo facing an obvious uphill battle for e-reader dominance against Amazon and B&N, I think this is great step forward for both companies.

Now, don’t be too quick to underestimate the value of the Japanese e-commerce market:

Rakuten’s 2010 revenues exceeded US$4.2 billion (JPY 346.1 billion) with operating profits of approximately US$782M (JPY 63.7 billion). The company is publicly-traded (JASDAQ: 4755) with a market capitalization exceeding US$10 billion (JPY 1 trillion) and more than 10,000 employees worldwide as of December 2010. Rakuten ranks amongst the top 10 Internet companies in the world (along with Google, Amazon, eBay, Baidu, Yahoo, etc.).

Source: Wikipedia

Additionally, while the Japanese e-book market is valued at US$90 million now, researchers believe it could grow to become a whopping US$3 billion market by 2015.

Just like how Amazon is dominating and growing the e-book business in the US, this move could allow Rakuten to do the same in Japan. More importantly, from the Canadian perspective, this gives the Toronto-based Kobo the opportunity, resources, and customer base it needs to gain a real foothold in the e-reader space.