The Kobo Libra Colour and Clara Colour are great colour e-readers but are held back by lock-in

The problem with most e-readers is that they’re not really designed for reading books. They’re designed to sell you books. Amazon, which has the largest market share in the US, is particularly famous for this, but Barnes & Noble is guilty of the same accusation. Kobo is perhaps the least offensive in this regard – it has Pocket and Overdrive integration! But often, when I’ve been totally enamored with Kobo’s gorgeous new color e-reader, I’ve suddenly been reminded: This thing is here to sell me books.

That’s a shame, because Kobo’s new Libra Colour and Clara Colour are the closest we’ve gotten to a perfect e-reader in recent memory. Both the $219.99 Libra Colour and $149.99 Clara Colour are incredibly lightweight but sturdy enough to feel comfortable, not flimsy. Both feature Kaleido 3 displays, meaning book covers are rendered in true colour. Both turn pages and navigate stores much faster than the $249.99 Boox Page (the Palma’s bigger, slower brother) — impressive considering the Kaleido 3 display is a bit slower than a more traditional monochromatic e-ink display found in the Page.

I liked the more expensive Libra because I prefer asymmetrical e-readers with dedicated buttons to ones that function more like traditional tablets. That it also has stylus support for note-taking is a plus. Still, both e-readers are charming and pleasant to use, and over the past few months I’ve found myself reaching for the Libra over the Boox—which has been my main e-reader until now. I just like the reading experience more. Sure, the Boox gives me every reading app available (it’s an E Ink Android tablet), but the Libra doesn’t have any of the weird little glitches that are typical of Android on E Ink.

Both Kobo e-readers also support color text highlighting, and their touchscreens feel much more responsive and responsive than the Boox Page’s. However, those highlight colors aren’t particularly vibrant. The Kaleido 3 display on both devices offers color, but the color is akin to that of a newspaper that’s been sitting in the sun for a few days. Plus, that color comes at the expense of both devices, making the black-and-white reading experience a little less clear. It’s still infinitely better than previous color e-ink technologies, which often gave the entire display a green tint.

My real problem with these devices is not the color displays, but the dependency.

Kobo’s e-readers are designed for buying books rather than reading them. They’re tied to the Kobo bookstore, which is run by Rakuten, a Japanese retailer often referred to as the “Japanese Amazon” or “Japanese Barnes & Noble” if you want to summarize the company. Rakuten is very good at selling books, and Kobo’s integrated bookstore is similar. It doesn’t have quite the same library as Amazon; Amazon has more self-published books and carries more niche content from boutique publishers. Still, Kobo’s bookstore has a decent selection. If it’s a reasonably popular book, you’ll find it on Kobo.

Unlike other non-Android-based e-readers, Kobo’s e-readers also have a more traditional built-in library via Overdrive. If you have a library card from a library that works with Overdrive, you can borrow e-books. Unfortunately, this is where you run afoul of Kobo’s bookstore business and its e-reader business. To borrow books, you either have to search for them using your phone in an app like Libby, or you have to use the Discover tab, then select the Overdrive tab and hope you can search for the book you want. Or you have to search for the book in the Kobo store and once you find the book, you have to tap the More Options button next to the much larger Buy Now and Wish List buttons, and then actually tap the Borrow from Overdrive button to see if the book is available to borrow from your library. It’s awful, and when I asked an otherwise very smart friend to try to borrow a book, she couldn’t even figure out how.

Also, you can’t have more than one library card active on the Kobo at a time. If you finish reading a book and want to read another one that’s tied to a different library card, you have to log out and log back in with the other card instead. I had to repeatedly switch between my New York Public Library and Jersey City Public Library cards, and it was extremely frustrating. I don’t have to do that when I use the Libby app on my Page or iPad.

The same problem occurs when using Kobo’s built-in “experimental” web browser. I can navigate websites just fine, and if I want to try reading a book over the web, I can theoretically do that. No app required. Just the browser is painfully underdeveloped. It would be nice if I could scroll or paginate using Libra’s built-in buttons like I can with the EinkBro browser on Android e-readers.

Loading ebooks from other stores onto the device is also a pain. You have to connect the ereader to your computer and drag and drop files (though Calibre, the ebook management app, makes that a bit easier). But this problem isn’t unique to Kobo. Amazon and Barnes & Noble also insist that you sideload books. But after years of the Boox ecosystem (and the iPad), it feels odd that these systems all insist that you stick so closely to their bookstores. It’s a level of dependency that seems absurd, and with Kobo’s ecosystem, it feels even more absurd because in so many other ways, it really does seem like the company is trying to get it right with ereaders.

The Kobo Libra Colour and Koko Clara Colour are fast and nearly perfect for pulling out of the way when you just want to read a book. Their colour displays aren’t as sharp as the LED displays on an iPad Mini – or even a monochrome E Ink display – but the colour adds a welcome spice to the experience that black and white can’t. The fact that they even offer things like a web browser and Overdrive and Pocket support is very pleasing compared to what Amazon does. But the binding, man. The binding may be the norm in the e-reader world, but it shouldn’t be.