Kobo’s excellent color e-readers are held back by the lock

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 particularly notorious for this, but Barnes & Noble is guilty of the same thing. Kobo is perhaps the least offensive about this—it has Pocket and Overdrive! But often, when I’ve found myself totally enthralled by Kobo’s gorgeous new color e-readers, I’ll suddenly be slapped in the face with a reminder: This thing is here to sell me books.

That’s a shame, because Kobo’s new Libra Color and Clara Color are the closest we’ve gotten to a perfect e-reader in recent memory. The $219.99 Libra Color and $149.99 Clara Color are both ridiculously light, but with a sturdiness that makes them comfortable, not flimsy. Both include a Kaleido 3 display, which means book covers are rendered in true color. Both turn pages and navigate stores much faster than the $249.99 Boox Page (the Palma’s larger, slower sibling)—impressive, considering the Kaleido 3 display is a bit slower than a more traditional monochrome E Ink display found on the Page.

I found that the more expensive Libra appealed to me because I prefer asymmetrical e-readers with dedicated buttons to ones that function more like traditional tablets. The fact that it also supports a stylus for note-taking is a plus. Still, either one is a lovely and enjoyable e-reader to use, and over the past couple of months I’ve found myself repeatedly choosing the Libra over the Boox, which has been my primary e-reader until now. I just like the feel of reading on it better. Sure, the Boox gives me every single reading app available (it’s an Android E Ink tablet), but the Libra doesn’t have any of the weird little issues that Android has on E Ink.

Both Kobo eReaders also support color text highlighting, and their touchscreens are much more responsive and responsive than the Boox Page’s. Those highlight colors aren’t particularly vibrant, though. The Kaleido 3 display found in both does get you some color, but the color is similar to what you’d see in a newspaper left out in the sun for a few days. Plus, that color comes at the cost of both making the black-and-white reading experience a bit less crisp. That’s still infinitely better than previous color E Ink technologies, which often gave the entire screen a green tint.

My real problem with these devices is not the color display, but the fact that they are locked.

Kobo’s e-readers seem more designed for buying books than reading them. They’re tied 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 offers more self-published books and features more niche content from specialty publishers. Still, Kobo’s Bookstore is pretty diverse. If it’s a vaguely popular book, you’ll find it on the Kobo.

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

You also can’t have more than one library card active at a time on the Kobo. Instead, when you finish a book and want to read another one linked to a different library card, you have to sign out and sign back in with the other card. I had to switch between my New York Public Library and Jersey City Public Library cards several times and was thoroughly annoyed by it. I don’t have to do this when using the Libby app on my Page or iPad.

You have the same problem using Kobo’s built-in “experimental” web browser. I can browse websites without a problem, and if I want to try reading a book on the web, I can theoretically do so. No apps are needed. Only the browser is woefully underdeveloped. It would be nice if I could scroll or page using the Libra’s built-in buttons like I do with the EinkBro browser on Android e-readers.

Getting e-books from other stores onto the device is also a hassle. You have to plug the e-reader into your computer and drag and drop the files (though Calibre, the e-book management app, makes it a bit easier). But this problem isn’t unique to Kobo. Amazon and Barnes & Noble also insist that you download books. But after years of the Boox ecosystem (and the iPad), it’s odd that these systems all insist that you stay so closely tied to their stores. It’s a level of dependency that seems absurd, and with Kobo’s ecosystem, it seems even more absurd because in so many other ways it really does seem like the company is trying to get it right when it comes to e-readers.

The Kobo Libra Color and Koko Clara Color are fast and nearly perfect for getting you out of your way when you just want to read a book. Their color screens aren’t as sharp as an iPad Mini’s LED (or even a monochrome E Ink display), but color adds a welcome zest to the experience that black and white can’t. The fact that they even offer things like a web browser and support for Overdrive and Pocket is a big plus compared to what Amazon is doing. But lock-in, man. Lock-in may be the norm in the e-reader world, but it shouldn’t be.