Kobo Libra Color Review—Our Favorite Alternative to the Kindle

I’ve spent years being stubborn about physical books. Work, video games, and all other tasks be damned, I spend too much time staring at screens already. Why would I do my leisure reading on a screen? Recently, though, all that has begun to change.

Some of that has been a deeper understanding of e-ink screens. Modern e-book readers are are great at reducing eye-strain, but it’s also been a lifestyle change. I’m busy, more on-the-go than I’ve ever been. Carrying a 900 page paperback of Dune isn’t exactly practical. Modern e-readers are thin, lightweight, and packable. And, to my own surprise, my favorite one isn’t even a Kindle.

Amazon’s market dominance means that “Kindle” is basically shorthand for e-reader, but competition is getting stiffer. Currently, my favorite alternative is this Canadian-made Kobo Libra Colour. It’s about $50 cheaper than the Kindle Colorsoft, and there’s a ton of reading you can do on it without paying a cent for e-books with a library card of digital stockpile of PDFs. While the experience of using the Libra Colour isn’t as seamless as an Amazon Kindle, it gives me more options at a lower price of entry. If you want ease of use, go Amazon Kindle. If you want freedom, join me on the Kobo side.

My first impressions.

At first glance, the Kobo Libra Colour isn’t much. I mean that positively. It boasts a 7-inch color e-ink screen, is as small as an iPad mini but easier to use one-handed. It’s easier to handle on a crowded subway car than even the thinnest of paperbacks, with a responsive touchscreen and two physical buttons to page forward and back. By and large, these are all traits of a good e-reader. So, what does the Libra Colour do that’s so special?

For starters, it’s got color. Side by side, it’s not as sharp or vivid as the Kindle Colorsoft, but it’s color. I’m not watching videos on it, and I kind of prefer the more washed-out look of the Kobo color device. It gives manga and graphic novels a lived-in feel. Cover art is where color often seeps into my regular book reading, though. The Libra Colour will display the cover art of the book (or audiobook) I was last reading while it sleeps, which is a nice touch. You can also take notes—highlight, make scribbles, or whatever—in color, a huge plus.

The use of color doesn’t seem to have meaningful impact on battery life either. Even switching between color comics and black and white text, the Libra Colour’s battery lasts for hours upon hours of reading between charges. I’ve said this before when reviewing smartwatches, but the longer between charges the better. That’s doubly true when your tech is replacing something that doesn’t need charging, like a book. I can put this thing down for a week and pick it up at the same battery life I left it. If I charge it twice in a month, I know I’m really enjoying a book.

It’s an open book for reading options.

To be honest, the worst part of the Kobo experience is navigating the storefront. The Kindle store is just more streamlined. Kobo lacks the eye-catching design that Amazon has. Search is another weak link. Whenever I back out from the store page for an item I’ve landed on, I am booted all the way back to the Discover home, or whatever page I had last navigated to from Discover. If I wanted to find that list of William Gibson books I looked up before clicking into Mona Lisa Overdrive, I’d have to back all the way out to my recent searches.

For me, this is just a sign from god to not buy e-books, and I love that Kobo offers other ways to get your books. First, if you have a library card, the Discover store has an OverDrive tab right there. If your local branch uses either the Libby or Sora app for digital check-outs, you can access a library-sized selection without paying a fee or dealing with Kobo’s storefront. I love to save an article using Pocket, send it to My Articles folder on my Libra Colour, and read it on my commute without worrying about data usage. Second, you can upload any file you have saved as a PDF to the e-reader via Dropbox or Google Drive—both have relatively simple built-in app integration. This is a level of support and customization that Kindle doesn’t match, since it’s more of a vehicle for Amazon purchases. You can put PDFs on Kindles, yes, but there’s no native Dropbox app.

Personally, this is why I love the Kobo. I don’t endorse any specific illegal activity when it comes to acquiring books, but a lot of the old sci-fi novels I love to read are out of print, and the authors are long gone. So, these resources are a great way for me to get my oddball collection of digital books onto one device. Reading some of these, I noticed the large (or colorful) pages take a while to load, longer than e-books purchased from the Kobo store. It’s a bit of DIY jank, but it comes with the territory. For the freedom, I’ll gladly sacrifice a bit of convenience.

And what about audio books?

An undervalued aspect of the e-reader is audiobooks. While it’s not built for it entirely, the Kobo Libra Colour ends up being a pretty damn good audiobook reader. I haven’t had any problems with sound quality, and connecting a pair of Bluetooth headphones is as easy as on my phone.

It’s not a perfect option and does have some disadvantages to using a phone or old iPod. For example, you can’t use wired headphones to listen, even if they can connect via the USB-C port. Another inherent issue to the format is that audiobooks take up a lot of space. While 32 gigabytes is plenty for a large collection of EPUB files, audio files will eat up that storage in a heartbeat. Overall, though, the option to have a few audio books on deck makes the Kobo more versatile.

Final Verdict

The Kobo Libra Colour is a worthy e-reader, and a worthwhile alternative to buying into the Kindle ecosystem. The Kobo store isn’t as easy to navigate as Kindle’s, nor can it quite stay competitive with prices and deals. If you buy all your books, that might cancel out the lower cost of entry. But if you’re digitally renting from the library or using PDFs, the Kobo Libra Colour is a far more affordable way to get your books.

I love it on it’s own merit, too. Reading for an hour doesn’t make my hurt the way it does on my phone or computer, so I’ve started sending stuff I’m reading for work over to the Kobo. That’s where it wins over a Kindle. If you want something that’s easy to integrate into all aspects of your reading life, I’d recommend this Kobo Libra Colour first and foremost.

Why Trust Esquire?

Here at Esquire, we compile our guides by performing heavy research and testing, and the gadgets we choose to award are what we’d spend our own money on. We choose the best tech for you based on our hands-on experience. In a month with the Kobo Libra Colour, I’ve read full books, articles, and issues of manga on the device. I tested out the audiobook Bluetooth playback and spent considerable time using the touch screen both with and without the Kobo Stylus 2.