Two of my favourite colour e-book readers are the most affordable they’ve been in months

Color isn’t important in an e-reader, however let’s be trustworthy, it’s a pleasant perk that may deliver digital books, magazines, comics, cookbooks, and different publications to life. The catch is that colour e-book readers are usually considerably pricier, which makes as we speak’s offers stand out. Right now, the Kindle Colorsoft (16GB) and Kobo Libra Colour are matching their lowest costs up to now, with the Amazon e-reader going for $169.99 ($80 off) at Amazon and Best Buy, and the Libra Colour going for $199.99 ($30 off) by way of Rakuten’s online storefront.

At their core, each are wonderful e-readers with 7-inch, 300ppi E Ink shows, which drop to 150ppi when viewing colour. The Colorsoft’s show is barely extra vibrant in most cases, however the distinction isn’t dramatic. Each additionally affords IPX8 water resistance, so that you don’t want to fret about spills and might comfortably learn within the tub or by the pool.

Which one makes extra sense for you largely is dependent upon the place you purchase your books, how a lot storage you want, and whether or not you prefer to take notes. The Colorsoft is nice if you happen to’re closely embedded in Amazon’s ecosystem, as shopping for and accessing Kindle books is intuitive and doesn’t require any sideloading. As the extra inexpensive possibility in Amazon’s lineup, the usual Colorsoft delivers a virtually equivalent studying expertise to the Signature Edition, and it helps Amazon’s “Send to Alexa Plus” function, which helps you to ship notes or paperwork to Amazon’s AI-powered assistant for summaries, to-do lists, reminders, and extra. The draw back is that it lacks wi-fi charging and an auto-adjusting entrance mild — that are normal on the step-up mannequin — and comes with 16GB of storage as a substitute of 32GB.

That mentioned, if I didn’t already personal so many Kindle books, the Libra Colour could be my choose. It affords double the storage at 32GB and contains intuitive bodily page-turn buttons. You also can write notes whereas studying, provided that it affords stylus assist, and it contains built-in pocket book templates, in addition to the power to transform handwriting to typed textual content. It additionally helps EPUB and a wider vary of file codecs, and allows you to save articles for offline studying with Instapaper. And it additionally affords adjustable heat lighting, which makes studying at evening slightly simpler on the eyes.