Kobo has just announced the Libra Color, their first e-reader and e-note with Kaleido 3 colour E INK technology. You can buy ebooks, manga, and comics, read them in vibrant colours, and use them as a digital notebook. Bring magic to your margins by annotating your pages, organizing your thoughts, and highlighting inspiring lines, all in colour. With Kobo Stylus 2 compatibility, you can dive deeper into your favourite stories by marking meaningful moments and highlighting powerful passages in the eBooks you love.
The Kobo Libra Colour features a 7-inch E INK Kaleido 3 colour e-paper display with a black and white resolution of 1264×1680 with 300 PPI. The colour panel’s resolution is 150 PPI. There are two colours of the Libra to purchase: black and white. There are manual page-turn buttons, which help use the device one-handed to turn pages rapidly; you can also elect to use the capacitive touchscreen display to do it, pinch, and zoom. Read during the day or night, thanks to the ComfortLight PRO adjustable brightness and colour temperature for blue light reduction.
Underneath the hood is a MediaTek MT8113T – dual-core ARM A53 @ 2.0 GHz processor, 1GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage. Although the Libra Colour can’t swim, it is certified IPX8 for up to 60 minutes in 2 meters of water. There is a USB-C port for charging and transferring data and wifi to connect to the internet. You can use the Kobo browser to visit your favourite websites or Overdrive to borrow colour content from your local library. Bluetooth 5.0 can be used to listen to audiobooks purchased from Kobo. It is powered by a 2050 mAh battery, and the dimensions are 144.6 x 161 x 8.3 mm and weighs 199.5 g.
In addition, for every reader who is also a journaler, in-the-margins note-taker, or page-decorating BookTok’er, Kobo Libra Colour is also Kobo’s most affordable stylus-enabled e-reader with the addition of a Kobo Stylus 2 (sold separately), with colour handwriting, highlighting, and notebooks. Building on the success of Kobo Sage and Kobo Elipsa 2E handwriting experiences, the new Kobo Libra Colour brings stylus-based writing and Kobo’s patented write-anywhere ebook annotations to their popular 7” format.
Kobo Libra Colour is made with recycled and ocean-bound plastics. This diverts CDs and DVDs from landfills and plastic bottles from the planet’s oceans. The retail packaging for this e-reader is also made with 100% FSC-certified recycled paper and is printed with soy ink.
Kobo Libra Colour retails for $249.00 CAD/$219.99 USD. The Kobo Stylus 2 is available and retails for $89.99 CAD/$69.99 USD. Pre-orders will be available on April 10. The devices will be available in stores and online as of April 30, 2024, in Canada, the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and Turkey. You can also order it from the Good e-Reader Store.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.