The Kobo Libra Colour is a great, responsive e-reader with colour support, though I’m still not 100% convinced I actually need colour.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Colour e-Ink display | Colour presentation is muted – and do you really need it? |
| OverDrive support adds a literal library’s worth of reading | Not all OverDrive content is supported or available |
| Stylus compatible for annotations and notepad duties | Stylus isn’t included |
Score: 4.5/5
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Buy The Kobo Libra Colour! | Buy On Amazon |
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In this review
Kobo Libra Colour Specifications
Kobo Libra Colour Design
Kobo Libra Colour Performance
Kobo Libra Colour Battery
Kobo Libra Colour Verdict
Ethical disclaimer:
The Kobo Libra Colour, Kobo Stylus 2 and Kobo Libra Colour Stylus Case used in this review were sent to me by Kobo, and they have indicated that they’re not going to ask for them back.
That does raise a potential issue of undue influence if not disclosed, which is why I’m saying it upfront. Lots of “reviews” sites don’t do this, and I think that’s a huge disservice to their readers, because it’s basically a betrayal of trust.
That’s not how I work. Kobo has absolutely no oversight over this review, and whether a product stays with me or goes back has zero influence on my reviews, period.
For more on ART’s Ethics position, see here.
Design
Before I start discussing the Kobo Libra Colour’s physical design, I want to pause for a moment and applaud Kobo for one very simple design detail.
The Kobo Libra Colour is the Kobo Libra Colour in Australia (and, I suspect, the UK), not the Kobo Libra Color.
That almost certainly comes down to the company’s Canadian roots, but I can’t count the number of products sold in Australia with hues attached that have simply been launched here as the “Color” version, as though the whole English-speaking world uses American English spellings.
It’s a small matter for sure, and maybe I’m just being pedantic, but showing you care about the language of a country where you’re selling goods should mean something, rather than just forcing incorrect spellings on an audience, especially when you’re trying to sell literary-based technology such as this. I feel like I’ve digressed enough down this particular rabbit hole and should get on with the review, no?
The Kobo Libra Colour is built around a 7 inch colour (aha!) capable touchscreen. Colour on e-ink readers isn’t all that new – indeed, the Kobo Libra Colour itself is more than a year old already, and it’s been a while to be honest upfront since I’ve tested out a Kobo product – but it does represent a slightly different take on the classic monochrome e-readers that still make up the majority of the market for this kind of product.
With a resolution of 1264×1680 the display is reasonably sharp, and it’s worth pointing out that this resolution could also be expressed as 1680×1264, because the Kobo Libra Colour’s display can be flipped between effective portrait and landscape modes while reader simply by flipping its orientation around. One slightly odd limitation here is that the main menu mode is portrait only, so if you’re reading or notetaking in landscape mode and exit out to the menu, you’ll be faced with a sideways array of your books.
The right hand side (or lower side in landscape mode) encompasses the primary back and forward buttons, built into a gentle rising curve that makes the Kobo Libra Colour easy to hold in this orientation. That curved lip doesn’t feel quite as good in my hands in landscape mode where it becomes something of a jutting “chin” for the Kobo Libra Colour, but that’s a very subjective take; I could imagine some passionate readers might love that kind of hand grip a lot.
The jutting right hand side of the Kobo Libra Colour also provides space for its USB-C charging port. At the rear you’ll find the power button, though I doubt you’ll use it all that much outside setting it up, because like every other e-ink reader ever it essentially uses no power when suspended, and waking it up is much easier by using either of the side buttons.
Kobo sells the Kobo Libra Colour in either a black or white finish; the black model is the one sent my way and it would absolutely be my recommendation for any keen readers, primarily because white plastic shows wear and tear a whole lot faster than black plastic does. Also, most e-readers last a good long time, and over the years white plastic can also discolour noticeably depending on its composition. I don’t have a time machine and a white Kobo Libra Colour handy to test that assertion, but still, I’d stick with basic black if I were you.
Speaking of durability, Kobo rates the Kobo Libra Colour as being IPX8 rated for water resistance. This does raise the prospect of underwater reading at that rating, though I wouldn’t do so if I were you; IP ratings rely on clean lab water, not your bath or pool water per se. Still, it’s nice to think that the Kobo Libra Colour should have a better chance of surviving being in your bag during a sudden rainstorm or maybe surviving a quick drop into water if that were to happen.
The Kobo Libra Colour can also be used as a digital notepad, but to take advantage of that capability, you’ll need Kobo’s specific Kobo Stylus 2 for any kind of jottings. It’s not included, and it will cost you an additional $119.95 AUD to get hold of. That’s within the kind of range most stylus products command, but it still would have been nice to see it included, or possibly for Kobo to offer a slightly cheaper bundle if you opt to buy the stylus at the same time.
Kobo sent a Kobo Stylus 2 my way for testing, as well as the optional $49.95 Kobo Libra Colour Stylus Case. That does feel more optional to me; while it does provide an easy storage slot for the Stylus 2, it’s just a simple folio-style cover case, and I do somewhat feel that Kobo missed a trick here by not building it in a foldable style so that you could use it to prop up the Kobo Libra Colour for hands-free reading.
Performance
Setting up the Kobo Libra Colour is reasonably easy exercise of connecting the device to your Wi-Fi network (2.4Ghz or 5GHz) and then signing into a Kobo account. Like competitor Amazon, the selling of e-readers is essentially a tool to help sell eBooks, because Kobo has a significant presence in that market.
You’re also prompted to join Kobo Plus, Kobo’s book subscription service on setup. In Australia, Kobo Plus costs $13.99/month for an eBook only version of the service, or $16.99/month for Kobo Plus Read & Listen, which opens up a selection of audiobooks as well.
There’s nothing wrong with a subscription service if you can get reading value out of it, but I do have two notes of caution here. Firstly, I’m not that impressed that during the setup phase, the very small cancel button for if you don’t want a trial of the service is hidden well away from the far more obvious button to sign up. It’s also slightly annoying to me that Kobo talks up the ability for a free trial of either Kobo Plus or Kobo Plus Read & Listen, but doesn’t actually tell you how long the trial will be until you’re essentially at the purchase screen. For what it’s worth (at the time of writing) the free trial runs for a month.
Once you’ve stepped through the business of setup, the Kobo Libra Colour’s layout is reasonably easy to parse. It has honestly been a decade since I’d last tested a Kobo device, though I have tested more than a few Kindle e-readers from arch Kobo competitor Amazon, and I did wonder if I’d find the differences stark coming from one to the other.
Also read:
The short answer: Not really a problem if you were thinking of switching camps, because really when you’re using an e-reader what you really want is access to the words to go into your brain as simply as possible, and while it would be feasible to get that badly wrong, it’s not hard to get it right, either.
The Kobo eBook store is broadly competitive and comparable to Amazon’s Kindle store offering in terms of the books you can find and buy through it, including some particularly fine tomes that (for some reason, cough) I feel compelled to point out you really ought to buy:
Yes, I wrote a book about exploding sharks, and yes, I will make money if you buy either or both books.
Which you totally should, obviously.
Blatant self-interest plugs aside, Kobo has one particular trick up its sleeve that I reckon puts it well ahead of anything that Kindle offers for very keen readers.
Kobo is owned by Rakuten, who also own Overdrive, which is the basis for the Kobo eBook store in the same way that Amazon is the basis for the Kindle eBook store. However, Overdrive is also the basis for services such as Libby, and if you’re reading this in Australia, the odds are very good that your local public library offers Libby as a book borrowing platform.
What this means is that it’s feasible to set up an Overdrive account on the Kobo Libra Colour and borrow available eBooks through your local library to read without having to spend a single extra cent to do so.
There are some caveats, however. The Overdrive tab within the Discover section of the Kobo Libra Colour does reflect the baseline of what your local library chooses to present to readers, but you don’t get access to everything that you can get through the Libby app itself on a tablet or smartphone. Magazines are the big obvious omission, but there are also some books that will appear in the iOS or Android versions of Libby that simply aren’t made available to borrow this way.
This is almost certainly a limitation of the Kobo bookstore, I feel, because it does seem to correlate to titles that you can buy, and that’s especially true because if you tap through a borrowable book in the Overdrive tab, it takes you to the Kobo buying page for that book first. You have to tap on the extension ellipsis menu on the side to uncover the “Borrow with OverDrive” option for each tome in turn.
You also can’t search your library’s OverDrive/Libby offerings directly as just OverDrive books on the Kobo Libra Colour; all you get is the essential “front page” selection of titles depending on your library’s choice to browse. Other books are available, but you’ve got to find them yourself. One tip here: Load up the Libby app on your phone, do your searching there and then search for titles on the Kobo Libra Colour to speed your discovery journey.
OverDrive is available on other Kobo devices, but the big hook for the Kobo Libra Colour is of course that Colour suffix, with a colour e-ink display rather than the traditional monochrome of classic models.
In the Australian market the Kobo Libra Colour competes directly with the Kindle ColorSoft, and I’d love to able to tell you which one has a better e-ink screen… but I can’t, because while I did chase Amazon for a while for a Kindle Colorsoft to review, Amazon wasn’t keen on me doing so for reasons never specified. The Kobo Libra Colour is the best colour e-ink device I’ve ever tested… because it’s also the first.
To my understanding, both models are built on the same essential screen technology, which mixes the power advantages of e-Ink with abilty to display something that isn’t, well… basically black.
The effect of the Kobo Libra Colour’s screen is a slightly unusual one, however, with a slight matte effect that dulls onscreen colour if you were to compare it to a traditional LCD screen. Put the Kobo Libra Colour side by side with something like the Apple iPad Mini and the display colour differences become readily apparent. It’s not that the Kobo has bad colour representation per se, but it’s definitely more muted than you’d get on a standard display screen, which is in some ways appropriate for a screen that’s meant to be replicating the look of classic paper much of the time.
It does very much come down to what you want to read and see on an e-reader in the first place. Rather obviously most regular books are just black text on white pages, and you don’t colour for that, but the ability to display hues does have some impact when you’re talking about material such as graphic novels, illustrated works or any book that includes colour photographs.
All e-ink readers work by refreshing the entire screen only when you change the page over, and this does bring with it a slight flashing effect when you’re talking about colour that is far more obvious than on a standard monochrome screen. I didn’t find it uncomfortable, but some might.
The Kobo Libra Colour supports eBooks in EPUB, EPUB3, FlePub, PDF, MOBI, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, TXT, HTML, RTF, CBZ and CBR formats, and it works very nicely with eBook management apps such as Calibre if you’ve got your own legitimately owned eBooks that you want to sideload onto it.
Most e-readers I’ve reviewed have an “experimental” browser option.
The Kobo Libra Colour does too, and like all the rest of them… it isn’t very good.
One of the nice aspects of reviewing an e-reader is that I get to do a whole lot of reading as part of the review process, and this is a nice experience with the Kobo Libra Colour.
A 7 inch display screen isn’t huge, but I do feel like this hits the sweet spot for portability and easy reading of text especially; for a handful of comics I imported into the Kobo Libra Colour some fonts weren’t all that clear at the smaller size they were displayed at, but that’s as much an aesthetic factor depending on the artist and letterer of a given comic tome than anything else.
If you do opt for the $119.95 Kobo Stylus 2, you can also use the Kobo Libra Colour for annotating eBooks or creating your own notebooks for any purpose you’d like. Back when I reviewed the Kindle Scribe, I was somewhat disappointed in the way that Amazon limits what you can scribble on, but as far as I can tell, Kobo’s not interested in blocking your scribbles anywhere.
I could 100% scribble on Godzilla’s face here if I wanted to. I don’t. I mean, I’m not suicidal.
I could happily jot down notes on purchased books, sideloaded books and even borrowed OverDrive books, though I don’t imagine that notes there would perservere once the loan period expires. The Kobo Libra Colour can also do rudimentary handwriting recognition for your notes if needed. Here I did hit some issues, though it’s hard to say whether that’s a function of its inbuilt OCR or my own rather dodgy chicken scratch style writing – possibly both.
Battery
Assessing the battery life of any e-reader is always tricky, because it depends on so many factors; whether you’re reading constantly or for just short periods each day, how you’ve got the e-reader’s backlight configured (if it’s got one, and the Kobo Libra Colour does) and any usage of Wi-Fi or Bluetooth for audiobook purposes or the stylus for notetaking, for example
Kobo’s claim is that:
A single charge on the eReader lasts up to 40 days, based on 30 minutes of reading per day with the front light at 30% brightness and WiFi and Bluetooth wireless technology off.
My own reading during the review process has probably been more intense than I’d manage a lot of the time, but while I somewhat think that 40 day period might be a bit of a stretch, it certainly doesn’t feel impossible.
I charged the Kobo Libra Colour out of the box to 100%, and a couple of weeks later it’s sitting on 48% battery, which points more towards maybe 30 days rather than 40. Kobo does not provide a charger in the box with the Kobo Libra Colour, but most USB-C chargers should be able to top it up without too much fuss.
Kobo Libra Colour: Alex’s Verdict
Actual physical books? Still AMAZING. Buy them. The Kobo Libra Colour? Pretty good.
I do love the rather more open nature of the Kobo Libra Colour; it’s not locked down to just a few proprietary eBook standards the way that Kindles are, the integration of OverDrive adds a lot of potential reading value at no additional cost and as a small portable notebook it’s got a lot of potential beyond eBooks and Audiobooks. The Colour screen, while not as sharp as an LCD or OLED – and I never expected it would be – can add impact to a wide variety of written content.
At the same time, colour is expensive compared to a regular monochrome e-reader, and I do wonder about the wider value picture there unless it’s very important to your everyday reading journey.
The Kobo Stylus 2 works quite well but it does add a third again to the overall price of the Kobo Libra Colour. OverDrive is a great inclusion, but search is slow and sludgy on the device itself, and I often found myself using other devices to then search to find on the Kobo Libra Colour itself, which is less than ideal.
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Kobo Libra Colour: Pricing and availability
The Kobo Libra Colour retails in Australia for $379.95. The Kobo Stylus 2 retails for $119.95 and the Kobo Libra Colour Stylus Case costs $49.95.
|
Buy The Kobo Libra Colour! | Buy On Amazon |
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Buy The Kobo Stylus 2! | Buy On Amazon |
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