There are downsides to switching from Amazon's slicker ecosystem to Kobo's less restrictive one but we found ourselves entirely drawn to what the Libra Colour has to offer. Much of that has to do with the increased freedom to use the reader as we wanted, but the effort at a colour screen and the ability for note-taking via an optional stylus mean this Libra can do many things Amazon's Kindles won't (without a significant price bump).
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Battery
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Software
What’s the difference between the Kobo Libra Colour and, say, the Amazon Kindle Colorsoft? Besides the different spelling of the word ‘colour’, a fair bit. The former is made by Amazon, the latter by Rakuten Kobo, a Canadian company. That might be why the Libra Colour feels a little easier to get along with. It definitely accounts for the spelling difference.
There are obvious similarities. Both brands make e-readers with E-Ink displays, and both operate storefronts where you can buy the books that live on them. But Kobo’s focus is more on hardware sales than on selling masses of digital books, Amazon’s chosen path.
A new reading oasis
The spacious 32GB Kobo Libra Colour isn’t very different from the Libra 2, the black-and-white stalwart of the company’s range. Size and design are similar to that reader, both of which have cribbed a little from Amazon’s well-regarded Oasis device. A thin plastic casing holds the display, with a bulky bezel on one side that can be flipped to function on either side.
It might not seem like much, but the two physical buttons on that thicker bezel are one of the best features of any e-reader. It enables proper one-handed reading, with a press on the bottom key advancing a page and one on the top heading back. Sure, you can perform similar operations with a pure touchscreen, but the thumb gymnastics can become fatiguing.
The Libra Colour’s 7in touchscreen — the company calls it the ‘E Ink Kaleido 3 display’ — works better on black and white text than it does on coloured images. The Colorsoft shows the shortcomings colour E Ink displays face, and the same is true here — Kobo’s device has a 300ppi resolution for monochrome text and a mere 150ppi for colour.
The backlight here isn’t as intelligent as Amazon’s pricier efforts, even if the Kindle Oasis was a design companion. We did find ourselves missing the environmental lighting adjustments. There’s nothing quite like blowing your vision out at 2 AM because the brightness was set to full and you just had to read that next chapter instead of going back to sleep. There’s a timed option to dim brightness and change colour temperature you should make friends with.
Power isn’t everything
There also appears to be less under the hood of Kobo’s colour-screened reader. When reading PDFs or comic book file formats, there’s noticeable refresh lag when swapping between pages. This tendency is less of an issue on Amazon’s hardware, but that’s to be expected. Kindles are created using Amazon money, after all.
The double-flicker that a standard 100MB PDF suffers is, for a certain sort of reader, well worth the inconvenience. The Libra Colour’s software support is far broader and less locked down than Amazon’s own operating system. If you source your books from all over, odds are they’ll work here without tedious conversion. Supported are the EPUB, EPUB3, FlePub, PDF, MOBI, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, TXT, HTML, RTF, CBZ, and CBR formats. You’ll notice that Amazon’s own AZW3 and the even stroppier KFX formats are missing. Honestly? It’s no big loss.
The operating system interface isn’t as slick as Amazon’s take, but we found ourselves better served by the open nature of navigation and view choices. Kindle has been steadily locking down its devices, forcing readers to experience books the way it wants readers to. Kobo’s OS is far more customisable, a tradeoff we’d accept any day of the month. Kindle’s operating system feels more like Apple’s Mac OS these days, designed to funnel users who don’t know any better. Kobo’s setup is more like Windows 7, where experienced users could do… pretty much anything they liked.
Versatility in hand
It’s not just the versatility in file format and book transfer. Loading whole, complete PDFs from a computer is a trivial affair for the Libra Colour. The OS is explicitly designed for it. Best of all, once it’s done — over a cable as opposed to Amazon’s clunky email process — PDFs render in full colour. Side-loaded books also retain their cover art. Rakuten, basically, isn’t being a dick if you don’t buy from their store.
Reading regular books (an amazing experience) and comics and PDFs (a novel, if challenging one) on an e-reader isn’t enough for this device. There’s also the option to create notebooks, if you’ve splashed out on the R1,300 Kobo Stylus 2. Sketches and handwritten notes can be converted to text or left as your own terrible scrawls, or books and comics can be annotated. The stylus itself works well, though we can’t help cringing when drawing the point across the mildly textured display. The rear pad erases your mistakes, but if you were to gouge a furrow in that screen… the horror.
Kobo Libra Colour verdict
The Kobo Libra Colour takes elements of the Kindle Oasis, the Colorsoft, and the Scribe and integrates them into a single device that’ll cost you just R5,000 here in South Africa. There are concessions to the price, the most notable being a slower processor and a lack of ambient light sensors. But look at what you’re getting — the most comfortable reader design we’ve used to date, the ability to take notes on-device, and a colour screen. That you can have this at nearly half the price of the Colorsoft (and far less than the Scribe) is more than enough reason to add one of these to your shelf.
