How Color Makes These Kobo E-Readers Way More Useful

Kobo has added a bunch of color e-readers to its lineup, and they show why color could be the future of ebooks.

The Kobo Libra Colour and Kobo Clara Colour seem to be doing everything right, from price to features to repairability. If you're a hardcore e-reader lover, then you might be skeptical of the addition of color. What does it do to the battery life? Are the pages (already not as white as paper) dimmer or grayer? The answers appear to be no, and no, and the advantages are legion. They even work with styluses!

"Some books need color-coded note-taking and highlighting. The information contained within the pages pertains to multiple subjects, each with their own color," technology expert Daivat Dholakia told Lifewire via email

Color Theory

First up, let's look at the new devices. Kobo Libra Colour and Kobo Clara Colour (yes, that's how they spell color) are essentially the same as the B&W Libra 2 and Clara, with upgrades. There's the color screen, the ability to use the (optional $70) Kobo stylus for making notes, sketches, and marking up texts, plus DropBox and Google Drive integration (for document storage), and an improved processor for the Clara Colour.

Price-wise, they come in at only a little more than the monochrome versions. The Libra Color is $30 more than the Libra 2 at $220, and the Clara Colour is just $10 more than the Clara 2E.

So what about that screen? It's an E INK Kaleido 3 screen, which gives 16 levels of grayscale, plus 4,096 colors, and the screen refreshes fast enough to display animations and videos. According to E INK, the Kaleido 3 display has much more saturated colors than the previous version, which was a little washed out.

"We introduced collimated front lighting technology to our 6-inch and 7-inch size eReaders to provide better color performance, and have further engineered our software to automate the regulation of colors so they always look their best, no matter the content being displayed," said Michael Tamblyn, CEO of Rakuten Kobo, in a statement provided to Lifewire via email.

So how does it look? From the photos of the Kaleido screen available online, it looks pretty good. It's not going to reproduce the colors of comics or illustrated books as well as an iPad, but it's a lot better than a newspaper, and maybe as good as a mid-level magazine.

Highlight Reel

What's the point, though? Even if the color ink were as vibrant as a comic book, e-readers are generally too small to be good for that kind of media.

The answer is, they're e-books, but with color. They have all the advantages of any other e-reader—weeks-long battery life, you can read them outside on sunny days, they're waterproof and lightweight—plus color.

This means they're great for reading textbooks, making illustrations and diagrams much easier to understand. But my favorite part is highlighting text and using the stylus to draw doodles and make notes.

These new Kobos, like the B&W stylus-compatible Sage before them, integrate with cloud storage so you can easily open and save your notes, PDFs, and so on. Imagine reading a PDF peacefully on a nice restful e-ink screen, and marking it up with color highlights and diagrams.

And it's also going to be cool to see color covers on the lock screen.

There's one more thing. Kobo has teamed up with iFixit to make these new Kobos more repairable. There are no details yet (the new devices don't go on sale until the end of April), but this should mean repair guides, and available spare parts (batteries, at the very least). The web page says that you will be able to "replac[e] common components."

More than anything, the fact that these are quite affordable alternatives to standard B&W e-readers should make color ebooks more popular. Until we get one to test side-by-side with the regular versions, we won't know if the addition of color somehow inhibits the experience of reading in plain B&W. If it doesn't, it seems like color is the future of e-readers, and we're totally here for it.