If there’s a specific niche of gadgets that I absolutely love to review it has to be e-readers. Offering an experience devoid of distraction in a world where everything is designed to snatch our attention always feels like a breath of fresh air. I’ve been using the new Kobo Libra Colour, the very first colour e-reader I’ve ever used, and here’s whether it makes me want to switch from the traditional black-and-white e-readers.

Design

In construct, the Kobo Libra Colour isn’t very different from the Kobo Libra 2 I reviewed last year. This too features a 7-inch display with a wide bezel on the right and two buttons for page navigation. The power button rests on the top-left corner of the rear panel, nicely textured with tiny petal-shaped grooves. While it’s pretty to look at and makes for a firm hold, it can end up collecting a bit of dust over time. There’s also the USB-C port for charging and data transfer on the top right bezel.

The Kobo Libra Colour has an IPX8 rating, which means that it is fully waterproof for up to an hour in 2 metres of water.

Display

The 7-inch e-ink colour display (or the E Ink Kaleido 3 display as Kobo calls it) is lightweight, convenient enough to hold for long reading sessions. The device offers 300 pixels per inch (ppi) for black-and-white text and 150ppi for colour, which is pretty standard for an e-reader.

Having said that, because it’s e-ink, at the end of the day, colours don’t really pop onscreen like they would on a table or a smartphone. It’s more akin to colour on a photocopy paper, rather than, say, a colour coffee table book or even a paperback graphic novel. In any case, I first started with a regular e-book version of East of Eden by John Steinbeck to compare the experience of switching from my Amazon Kindle Paperwhite. The Kobo Libra Colour’s display seemed much brighter at the same brightness levels, and the text and the reading experience were hugely customisable. For the graphic novel experience, I first revisited Palestine by Joe Sacco, a timeless graphic novel about Sacco’s own experiences in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The rendering of illustrations and the narrative was very immersive on the device. The same was the case with Heartstopper by Alice Osman, an endearing queer-positive graphic novel about two British young adults who meet and fall in love. Reading this was easier on the eyes compared to other graphic novels where a lot of visual details and dialogues are packed into one frame or dialogue box.

The Kobo Libra Colour also supports audiobooks, however, there is neither a built-in speaker nor a 3.5mm headphone jack, so wireless headphones are the only way to tune in. Also, the audiobooks available for purchase directly from the Kobo store are quite atrociously priced. For example, Inspector Singh Investigates by Shamini Flint and Jonathan Keeble, was priced at ₹2,181! — while the original paperback costs about ₹600 in India.

Other features

The Kobo Libra Colour supports a bunch of third-party apps to sign in to the device. It supports Dropbox and Google Drive from which I could access documents to read them on the device. It also makes it easier to access books, PDFs and graphic novels that you might have stored on the cloud or on the device directly. There’s also integration with one of my favourite reading apps, Pocket, where I can log in and read articles I’ve already saved.

Tech Specs

The e-reader comes with a dual-core 2 GHz processor and 32 GB of storage, which can store tens of thousands of e-books. While storage is ample, the device isn’t the snappiest. It takes some time to switch between functions or go from the library to the store. In a world where we are so used to instant switching between apps and functions, this can get a bit annoying.

The device runs on a 2,050mAh battery, and as is the case with most e-readers, battery levels are not something you have to worry about on a daily, or even a weekly basis. I had to plug it in to charge only by the end of the third week of usage.

Verdict

The Kobo Libra Colour adds a splash of colour to the reading experience. This sounds great in theory. However, in the actual experience of reading in colour I can’t say that this is a huge bump up from the good ol’ black-and-white display. First, the colours aren’t exactly eye-catching. Second, it’s mostly web comics and some graphic novels that would really make the most of this feature. While reading regular e-books there’s almost no difference. So while the Libra Colour is a unique device that brings colour to the e-reading experience, this isn’t exactly its USP.