My favourite Kindle-beating e-reader is cheaper than ever in Amazon sale
That makes this colour-screen e-reader £30 cheaper than the black and white Kindle Paperwhite. If you’re looking to get your first e-reader, or perhaps upgrade your current one, the Kobo Clara Colour is amazing value at this price.
You get a colour screen, for starters. That means browsing your book library or the Kobo store in colour, with book covers popping out much more than they do on a monochrome E Ink display that you’ll find on the Paperwhite.
It also obviously means that any book you get with illustrations will be in colour, meaning this is a huge advantage over the Kindle Paperwhite if you want to download comic books or graphic novels for reading on the go.
The Clara’s headline feature is its colour screen, but its design is what also keeps me coming back to reading on it, even though I own several different, more expensive e-readers. The 6-inch screen hits the sweet spot for reading with one hand, meaning you can tap with a thumb on the matte display to skip pages.
The plastic body of the device is not the most premium out there, but the plastic is hardy and in white doesn’t pick up any fingerprints and is difficult to scratch – the same can’t be said for the rubberised Kindle Paperwhite that I found gets scuffed up and covered in finger oil very easily.
You can also link the Kobo to your local library card using the OverDrive service (the company that owns popular e-book library app Libby). This lets you borrow or place holds on e-books from your local branch right there in the software on the Kobo. It’s a great way to check out books or line them up for reading without spending too much in the Kobo store.
Although Kindles in the US have OverDrive functionality, they don’t in the UK, so a Kobo is currently the best bet if you want to spend less on e-books on these shores.
The Clara Colour is also waterproof and can playback audiobooks via Bluetooth to wireless headphones, plus it has a dark mode for inverting screen colours to read at night, a frontlit screen to make sure that’s possible, plus an automatic blue light filter.
For the offer price, I don’t believe there’s a better e-reader you can buy right now.
