Many of us already spend a lot of time staring at and reading in displays and ebook readers may not be for us all. That said, this is when e-ink-based displays come into the picture. Other than having the usual features of an ebook reader such as the ability to carry many, many books in a slim device, these also cause less eye strain than a regular one.
The Kobo Libra Colour is an ebook reader that features a 7-inch coloured e-ink-based Kaleido 3 display. The display is ridged and not flat to the rest of the front body.
On the front side, you have two physical keys to navigate between pages while a white LED light sits above them to indicate power. At the back, you have a physical circular power button; while the right side houses a USB type-C port near the top. Shaped to resemble a physical book with rounded corners on the one side and slightly sharper on the other, it's an IPX8-rated water-resistant device that should be okay with splashes and raindrops. Weighing just shy of 200 grams, it is a comfortable e-reader to hold and sit and read on, without feeling too heavy or thick by any means.
The 7-inch (1680 x 1264) display does a good job of handling text for reading books, as well as plain PDFs. It is just about okay but not great for reading outdoors in direct sunlight. For the colour part, it tends to be slightly grey-ish in tone when using it for reading something with coloured characters or something else, whether in landscape or not. The display itself is nice to stare at for longer periods, although you cannot compare it to a smartphone or tablet display since this is an e-ink display that's glare-free, and it does the job well enough.
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For reading your ebooks, you can get those from the Kobo store. There are three subscription options starting from Rs 199 per month for ebooks, Rs 149 for audiobooks and Rs 249 per month for both ebooks and audiobooks. You can also sideload your PDFs and epubs via the Google Drive and Dropbox integrations (audiobooks also work but are trickier to sideload). And your articles, too, using Pocket. I used both these options quite a bit and after the sync (which can take a minute or so) it loaded most things on the first try. You need to connect it to Bluetooth headphones or speakers to listen to audiobooks. It struggled to handle long-coloured PDFs at times. You can also make notes, annotate, and highlight text in different colours while reading but it requires purchasing a Kobo Stylus 2 (priced at Rs. 6,899). I also tried the official folding case (Rs. 3,999) which does a good job by giving extra protection and also puts the e-reader into sleeping mode when the lid is covered.
The device sports 32GB of internal storage so storing hundreds of ebooks isn't a problem. You can also expect to get great battery life – reading multiple ebooks or articles on it without it requiring charging, well over a week after a full charge.
If you aren't invested in Amazon's Kindle ecosystem with a library of ebooks, then the Kobo Libra Colour makes sense, especially if you like to read and annotate. Kobo Book store, though a little jittery to navigate through at times, doesn't come short on collections for books or audiobooks.
