Kobo’s great color e-readers are hampered by lock-in

The problem with most e-readers is that they’re not really meant to read books. They’re meant to sell you books. Amazon, which has the largest market share in the US, is most famous for this, but Barnes & Noble is guilty of the same. Kobo is perhaps the least offensive in this regard — it has Pocket and Overdrive integration! But often, when I’ve been falling head over heels for Kobo’s gorgeous new color e-readers, I’ve been reminded: This thing exists to sell me books.

That’s a shame, because Kobo’s new Libra Colour and Clara Colour are the closest thing to a perfect e-reader we’ve had in a while. Both the $219.99 Libra Colour and $149.99 Clara Colour are ridiculously light, but sturdy enough to feel comfortable in hand without feeling flimsy. Both have Kaleido 3 displays, which means they display book covers in true color. Both flip through and navigate stores much faster than the $249.99 Boox Page (the Palma’s bigger, slower sibling)—impressive, considering the Kaleido 3 display is a bit slower than the more traditional monochromatic E Ink screen in the Page.

I did prefer the more expensive Libra, as I prefer asymmetric e-readers with dedicated buttons over ones that function more like traditional tablets. The fact that it also has stylus support for taking notes is a plus. Still, either is a charming, fun e-reader, and over the past few months I’ve repeatedly chosen the Libra over the Boox — which has been my primary e-reader up until now. I simply find it a better reading device. Sure, the Boox gives me all the available reading apps (it’s an E Ink Android tablet), but the Libra doesn’t suffer from any of the odd little hiccups that are typical of E Ink Android.

Both Kobo e-readers also support color highlighting, and their touchscreens feel much snappier and more responsive than the Boox Page. However, those highlight colors aren’t particularly vibrant. The Kaleido 3 screen on both will give you color, but the color is about the same as what you’d see in a newspaper that’s been sitting in the sun for a few days. What’s more, that color comes at the expense of both, making the black-and-white reading experience a little less sharp. It’s still vastly improved over previous color E Ink technologies, which often gave the entire screen a green cast.

My real problem with these devices isn’t the color displays. It’s the lock-in.

Kobo’s e-readers feel more like books to buy than to read. They’re connected to the Kobo Bookstore, which is powered by Rakuten, a Japanese retailer often referred to as the “Japanese Amazon” or the “Japanese Barnes & Noble” when people want to quickly summarize the company. Rakuten is very good at selling books, and Kobo’s built-in bookstore is similar. It doesn’t have quite the same library as Amazon; Amazon has more self-published books and offers more niche content from boutique publishers. Still, Kobo’s bookstore has a decent spread. If it’s a somewhat popular book, you’ll find it on Kobo.

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

You also can’t have more than one library card active on the Kobo at a time. Instead, when you finish a book and want to read another book that’s linked to a different library card, you have to log out and log in with the other card. I had to repeatedly switch between my New York Public Library and Jersey City Public Library cards and was getting really annoyed. I don’t have to do this when I use the Libby app on my Page or iPad.

You run into the same problem if you use Kobo’s built-in “experimental” web browser. I can navigate to websites just fine, and if I want to read a book online, I can theoretically do that. No app is needed. The browser is just painfully underdeveloped. It would be nice if I could scroll or paginate using the Libra’s built-in buttons, like I can with the EinkBro browser on Android e-readers.

Getting eBooks from third-party stores onto the device is also a hassle. You have to plug the eReader into your computer and drag and drop files (though Calibre, the eBook management app, makes that a lot easier). But that 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 stay so close to their bookstores. It’s a level of lock-in that seems absurd, and with Kobo’s ecosystem, it feels even more absurd because in so many other ways the company really does feel like it’s trying to make eReaders right.

The Kobo Libra Colour and Koko Clara Colour are fast and just about perfect for getting out of the way when you just want to read a book. Their colour displays aren’t quite as sharp as an iPad Mini’s LED display – or even a monochrome E Ink display – but colour adds a welcome punch to the experience that black-and-white simply cannot. The fact that they even offer things like a web browser and Overdrive and Pocket support is especially welcome compared to what Amazon has to offer. But lock-in, man. Lock-in may be the norm in the e-reader world, but it shouldn’t be.