Read our full review of the Kobo Libra Colour.
Who it’s for:
For serious readers who don’t mind splurging a little, the Kobo Libra Colour delivers an upgraded e-reader experience. With a similar seven-inch display, the Libra Colour offers something the Kindle Paperwhite cannot: Color. Book covers and in-book illustrations and photos are all featured in color with the Libra. Plus, if you’re an annotator, you can highlight and mark up your pages in different colors to stay organized.
It’s equipped with more than enough storage at 32GB and is waterproof. Plus, if you were devastated by the discontinuation of the Kindle Oasis, the Libra Colour offers a similar design that includes page-turning buttons.
Why we like it:
If you were to ask me which e-reader to buy, it’s a real toss-up between the Kindle Paperwhite and the Kobo Libra Colour. While the Kobo Libra Colour is expensive at $219.99, it’s worth its price tag, something I can’t say is true for Amazon’s Paperwhite Signature Edition.
Above all, the Kobo Libra Colour has the best ergonomic design. It’s more square than a Kindle, as one side offers extra space for page-turning buttons. This makes it easier to hold, especially while lying down and reading one-handed. It’s the only e-reader (besides the iPad) on this list that has an internal gyroscope, so when you rotate the device, the display rotates with it. While reading in bed, if I flipped over, I could rotate the device to still be able to hold it on the side with page-turning buttons.
Plus, the Overdrive (aka Libby) integration is great as you can log in with your library card and your borrowed e-books instantly populate on the Overdrive tab. While this is a more seamless integration than Kindle, I do have some minor beef with it. On a Kobo you can only log in to one library card at a time, so if you borrow using multiple cards, you might be signing in and out of different accounts often. Plus, while using the Kobo Libra Colour, one of the library books I borrowed wasn’t available on the Kobo and I had to switch to the Paperwhite to be able to access it.
While the color display on the Kobo is nice, it is still rather muted. While reading Heartstopper, the colors were quite toned down in comparison to how they appeared on the iPad Mini. The Libra Colour’s battery life isn’t as strong as a Kindle Paperwhite’s. While testing the Kobo Libra Colour over ten weeks, my colleague Bethany Allard had to charge the device twice. Plus, it’s a bit slower than a Kindle with the occasional stall while switching between books.
While the Kindle may have the Kobo beat on processing and battery life, I still think the Libra Colour is a worthy upgrade as it offers the best design of an e-reader with the perk of color. Amazon’s first color e-reader, the Colorsoft, costs $279.99, so at $219.99, the Libra is a bargain.