A Brief Review of the Kobo Libra Color

TL;DR I'm a fan! It's light, it's got a nice screen, it's got good battery life, and it reads EPUBs natively.

More details below, in case the hyper-descriptive summary above wasn't enough for you.

Screen size/resolution hasn't been a huge issue for me, though that may be because I'm fairly partial to small font sizes. Kobo's operating system also natively supports uploading and using custom fonts, which is rather kind of them – I've opted to use Crimson Font, as I usually do for serif typefaces. I've read through some longer books (How to Build a Car, The Song of Achilles) without issue, and it's been fairly enjoyable to read with my Kobo in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other.

The buttons on the side are likely a design decision lifted from the Kindle Oasis, and I'm totally okay with that. I had my eyes on the Kindle Oasis for years but never thought I was reading ebooks enough to justify the upgrade from my Paperwhite. Sadly Amazon has gone in a different direction these days so the Oasis was discontinued. Regardless, the Libra Color is fairly similar in spirit, and has the benefit of using a color panel at a cheaper price than what Amazon charges for the Colorsoft. Some semi-evangelical forum members (cough cough, Reddit) claim that color panels can lead to meaningful loss in DPI and screen clarity, but I have noted no such issues personally speaking.

There's also been some active communities that have worked on modding and adding extensions to the Kobo Libra – NickelMenu being a prolific example – but I haven't actually found significant utility from any of them. I was hoping to find a way to read PDFs comfortably on the Libra, but that hasn't been very fruitful given the smaller screen size and fixed-layout properties of PDF. There doesn't seem to be any (recent) software that can convert PDFs into EPUB fairly accurately, so in the meantime I've been sticking to using Zotero on my desktop or iPad for paper-reading. This is also probably the more defensible way to do it long-term, purely from a perspective of managing annotations.

Would I buy it again? Definitely. Should you buy it? Debatable. Will you regret it? Assuming you actually read on it, I'd find it unlikely.