NEW YORK (The Deal) -- Japanese e-commerce specialist Rakuten continued its shopping trip across the U.S. on Thursday with an agreement to buy e-book provider OverDrive from Insight Venture Partners.

Tokyo-based Rakuten said it would pay $410 million to add OverDrive's 2.5 million titles to its online content business.

"As Rakuten expands its global internet services ecosystem, digital content represents one of Rakuten's three key strategic pillars, alongside e-commerce and finance," the company said.

Rakuten's billionaire owner, Hiroshi Mikitani, wants his company to get 50% of its revenue from outside Japan by 2020, and has been spending to make that happen. The company late last year paid $1 billion for discount site Ebates, boosting non-Japan revenue from 6% of total sales to 16%.

Earlier this month Rakuten, also bought an 11.9% stake in ride-sharing serviceLyft for $300 million as part of a Series E financing. The round brought in a total of $530 million for the San Francisco startup, which will use the cash to better compete against nemesis Uber.

The financing round valued Lyft at $2.5 billion.

Rakuten, which also has a minority stake in social media site Pinterest, first got into the online content business in 2012 with the $315 million acquisition of Canada's Kobo. Kobo makes an e-book reader that competes with Amazon's (AMZN) - Get Report Kindle. That same year it picked up Spanish Netflix (NFLX) - Get Report clone Wuaki.tv to add content and, in 2013, acquired San Francisco-based streaming company Viki.

No price was given in either the Wuaki or Viki acquisitions.

OverDrive, based in Cleveland, Ohio, was founded in 1986 by current CEO Steve Potash as a maker of interactive CDs. The company has since moved on to downloadable content, and primarily helps libraries loan digital content to members.

Insight Venture bought an unspecified majority stake of OverDrive in 2010. No terms were released in that deal.

The sale to Rakutenl is expected to close in April.

Read more from: