Amazon Kindle 16GB (2024) vs Kobo Libra Colour

The Amazon Kindle 16GB is the smallest and lightest reader Amazon sells, and the case for it is simple: its 6-inch, 300 ppi E Ink screen is as sharp as the Paperwhite's, so text looks the same for less money. At about 158 g it slides into a jacket pocket and stays comfortable in one hand through a long train ride.

Amazon rates the battery at up to six weeks, and it charges over USB-C, so a phone cable works. The 16 GB of storage holds thousands of ebooks; only audiobooks fill it in any meaningful way.

The savings come out of three places. There is no warm-light setting, so night reading means a dimmed white light rather than an amber one. There is no water rating, which makes the bath and the pool a gamble. And the 6-inch screen shows fewer words per page, so anyone who reads at a large font size turns pages constantly. Like every Kindle, it is built around the Kindle Store: EPUB files arrive through Send to Kindle and US library loans through Libby.

Watch the price. We have tracked it between $84.99 and $149.99 since June.

The Kobo Libra Colour is the e-reader for people who want to own their books rather than live inside one store. It reads EPUB natively, so titles bought from most shops other than Amazon load without conversion, and public-library loans through OverDrive are built into the device instead of routed through a phone app.

The hardware answers the Paperwhite's gaps. Two physical page-turn buttons sit on a thick grip edge, and the screen rotates so they work in either hand. It is IPX8 rated, which Kobo specifies as 2 meters for 60 minutes, and storage doubles to 32 GB, which matters once Kobo audiobooks are in the mix. The 7-inch Kaleido 3 color panel shows covers, comics and highlights in color, and it supports the Kobo Stylus 2 for margin notes, though the stylus costs extra.

Color E Ink has a trade. Black-and-white text stays at 300 ppi, but color content drops to 150 ppi and looks muted next to a tablet, and owners often note the color layer makes the page a shade darker than a monochrome screen. The Kobo Store is also thinner than Amazon's in some genres.