The best ereaders for 2024

Screen size: 6” | Display type: Black/white and color E Ink | Resolution: 300 dpi black & white, 150 dpi color | Capacity: 16GB| Battery life: Weeks | Waterproof rating: IPX8 (submergible to 6 feet for 60 minutes) | Warm light: Yes | Lock screen ads: No

Read our full Kobo Clara Colour review

Our previous pick for this category, the Kobo Clara 2E was an excellent ereader with a crisp display, a warm glow and responsive, intuitive touch controls all housed in a waterproof design that felt premium. When Rakuten announced the Clara would be updated, I worried we’d see Kobo device with superfluous revamping to justify an inflated price. Thankfully, that’s not the case. The Kobo Clara Colour not only adds color and a faster processor, it’s just $10 more than the previous generation.

As the name suggests, this ereader adds color to the page, lending a little vibrance to book covers, tables and graphs, and even the panels of graphic novels. The technology comes from E Ink, in the form of the Kaleido 3 module that incorporates a color filter layer on top of the standard black and white microcapsule layer. That results in two different resolutions on one screen: 150 dpi for color and 300 dpi for text.

Full-color pages remind me of comic book art from the ‘60s, muted but saturated. Color makes book covers more enticing and adds a little variety to headings, and tables in some non-fiction books. It’s certainly not a necessary feature, but it adds vibrance and it’s fun. 

There is a slight difference in clarity between the color and non-color version of the Clara. If you look closely, you can see a bit of noise on the white parts of the page. That's due to the added color filter layer. It's not distracting and only something I noticed when comparing the two generations side-by-side. but if absolute clarity is your primary goal, you may be better off with a non-color ereader.

Probably the more useful upgrade here is the dual 2GHz processor, a bump from the Clara 2E’s 1GHz CPU. There’s a noticeable improvement in the speed of the page turns and navigating from the menu to the page and back again is nearly instantaneous. As with the 2E, the Colour rarely mistakes a swipe for a tap or a page turn gesture for a menu request.

The adjustable warm front light is still here (it’s actually a little warmer on the Colour) and makes reading at night easy on the eyes. The operating system is the same, with intuitive access to the Kobo store, your personal books and titles from your local library via Overdrive. You can customize your reading experience with options for font, font size, line spacing, margins and so on. Kobos don’t have a way to save a group of display settings like the Kindle does, so I’d love to see that added with future OS upgrades. But for now, the customizations are just enough to get your book how you want it to look.

The Colour is nearly identical in shape and size, and has the same premium feel as the 2E, though the plastic has a grainier finish. The bezels are noticeably less flush with the screen now, though that didn’t alter my reading enjoyment.

Now that it costs $150, the Kobo Clara Colour is $50 more than the base model Kindle. But the waterproof build, warm front light, responsive controls and lack of ads (which cost $20 to get rid of on Amazon's device) make it worth it. And, in great news for the right to repair crowd, it’s even designed to be user-repaired once it falls outside of warranty through a partnership with iFixit. 

Rakuten still makes the Kobo Clara BW, which is nearly identical to our previous "best overall" pick. It doesn't suffer from the slight clarity loss that the color overlay presents, but it also still has the older processor.   

Of course, if you already own a mountain of Kindle books, you may want to stick with Amazon's system. In that case, your best bet is Amazon's Kindle Paperwhite Signature. Our reviewer Nathan Ingraham called it "the best ereader. Period."

Screen size: 6” | Display type: Black/white E Ink | Resolution: 300dpi | Capacity: 16GB| Battery life: Weeks |Waterproof rating: None | Warm light: No | Lock screen ads: Yes

Amazon has dominated in the ereader space for so long that I was surprised when a Kindle device didn’t win me over. A Kobo may have taken the top spot here, but nothing can beat the standard Kindle when it comes to price. It’s listed at $100 but has gone on sale every few months since its debut in October 2022, sometimes for as low as $75.

With it, you can access the best of what Amazon has to offer, including many exclusive titles. Kindle Exclusive is a catalog made up of a million titles, including books by established authors as well as newer, self-published writers; Kindle Unlimited offers the widest selection of any subscription-based reading service out there; and Audible Originals is made up of narrated titles and podcasts you can only hear through a Kindle device or Amazon-owned app.

If you like to switch between audiobooks and ebooks, Kindle is the way to go. When you buy both iterations of a title, you not only get a discount, but the Whispersync feature lines up where you are in the e-printed version with the narration, too. Say you listen for an hour and then want to read – the synchronization lets you pick up on-screen where you left off audibly. (Though we should point out that you can’t listen and read simultaneously on the same device.) In tests, the feature was fairly accurate, getting me close enough on the page or in the audio to figure out my spot.

The standard Kindle doesn’t feel particularly luxurious, but it doesn’t feel cheap either. The shell has a velvety finish that doesn’t collect fingerprints, but I found myself wishing it had more texture for a better grip. Navigating from a page to the menu isn’t as speedy as Paperwhite or the Kobos we tried. And it takes a few moments to wake from sleep after hitting the button and swiping.

Page turns are quick, but the touchscreen gestures didn’t always do what I wanted them to. I’d often find the page skipping forward when I thought I’d tapped to go back. There’s no warm light, which didn’t bother me during the day, but at night it felt like I was still staring at my computer.

Kindle’s reading customization is great, letting you dial in the font, size and margins. You can even save a set of settings as a “theme,” something not offered by other devices. I created one with larger text and wider line spacing called “tired eyes.”

Some people won’t be bothered by the lock screen ads that come standard on every Kindle device (unless you pay to remove them). They’re fairly innocuous, mostly promoting Kindle book deals or specific titles (it’s not like you’ll see promos for TVs or robotic pool cleaners). 

Personally, I like being able to set the sleep screen to the book cover of what I’m currently reading, but it’s easy to get over that if all you want is a more convenient way to consume books at the lowest price. It's also worth noting that the Kindle Kids is the same device but comes with a cover, a longer warranty and goes on sale more frequently than the standard version. 

Screen size: 7” | Display type: Black/white and color E Ink | Resolution: 300 dpi black & white, 150 dpi color | Capacity: 32GB | Battery life: Weeks | Waterproof rating: IPX8 (submergible to 6 feet for 60 minutes) | Warm light: Yes | Lock screen ads: No

When Kobo came out with the new Clara Colour, it also debuted the new Libra Colour, which might be the more exciting of the two devices. In addition to color technology from the E Ink Kaleido panel and an upgraded processor, the Libra now has stylus support. It’s the only ereader on this list with that feature, making it a lot like a small E Ink tablet — but all of its new features actually make it a better ereader.

When I wrote about the previous generation ereader, the Libra 2, I was impressed by how comfortable it was for reading. None of that has changed; the buttons and auto-rotating screen adapt the device to just about any reading position you chose and the thin design, textured back and soft-touch plastic give it a premium feel.

Kobo’s interface is nearly the same here as with other models, nicely organized to let you easily find your current reads or browse and search new titles from Kobo’s store or your local library in the Overdrive tab. The customizations for light and text let you get the page looking just how you like it, but there aren’t so many options that it feels like you’re writing code.

The new features add to the experience. In color, book covers all look more enticing — though, if your TBR list is already three feet long, this won’t not help things. The new processor makes waking from sleep, turning pages, navigating the menu and changing orientation zippy fast.

Then there’s the status compatibility. Try as they might, some new technologies don’t yet beat their real-world counterparts. That’s mostly how I feel about styluses — I’m just a big fan of pen on paper. But Kobo’s stylus makes it so fun to highlight text and scribble notes in the margins of a book that I’m starting to come around. Plus, it neatly and magnetically attaches to the side so it doesn’t get lost.

Pressing and holding the button on the side of the stylus highlights text while flipping it around erases. I accidentally pressed the button a few times when I was trying to write, but I got used to the placement after a few minutes of using it. You can pick from four different highlighter colors and view your written notes and spotlighted text in the notes section of any title — which I could see being pretty useful for book club reads, school assignments or just refreshing yourself on a past read before you dive into the sequel.

Writing in the margins or directly on the text worked on every book I tried. Though I should point out that if you change the font size in a book, your handwritten notes will be converted to a sticky note-type box. Going back to the original font restores your original scribbles.

The Kobo Libra Colour is $30 more expensive than the Libra 2, but you get a lot for $220. If it were just an ereader, the lovely colors, responsive reading experience, fast page turns and easy highlights would make it worth the price. But you also get features that make it more than just an ereader, like Dropbox and Google Drive integration, a beta web browser and free-writing and text-converting notebooks.

Of course, the stylus costs extra and you won’t get features like notebooks and writing in the margins without it. Together, the set costs $290, which is still $50 cheaper than the most popular stylus-enabled ereader, Amazon’s Kindle Scribe. That one does have a bigger, 10-inch screen, which, for me, is a little big for an ereader. The Libra Colour on the other hand has just the right features at the right size, plus some extras that stretch its usefulness.

Screen size: 7” | Display type: Black/white and color E Ink | Resolution: 300 dpi black & white, 150 dpi color | Capacity: 64GB | Battery life: Weeks | Waterproof rating: splash-resistant | Warm light: Yes | Lock screen ads: No

Color E Ink screens are the “new” thing in ereaders — even though the tech has been commercially available since around 2010. E Ink announced its Kaleido 3 display in 2022, and with the right combination of color saturation and clarity, it’s now appealing enough for general consumption. The latest ereaders from both Boox and Kobo are color models, and there’s little doubt Amazon will stick color in a Kindle in the near future (possibly as a replacement to the now-unavailable Kindle Oasis).

The Boox Go Color 7 (Amazon, Boox) is a natural choice to supplant our previous winner in this category. The Boox Page is still available, and represents a great multipurpose tablet that easily handles ereader and tablet duties. The new Go Color not only layers color on top of that, it also has double the storage capacity, an extra gig of RAM and ships with Android 12. The back is also textured instead of slick, an upgrade my accident-prone fingers are grateful for. And all of this comes at the same $250 list price as the Page.

Boox stuck a faster quad-core processor in the Page. That made for a noticeable uptick in speed when compared to the reader’s predecessor, the Leaf 2. This looks to be the same CPU in the Go Color and I haven’t noticed a huge speed difference with the new reader — though it’s plenty fast. The battery has the same 2,300mAh capacity, but ereader batteries last the order of a few weeks, so an upgrade in that department wasn’t really necessary.

The Go Color 7 runs on a fork of Android 12, which allows it to act more like a tablet than a conventional ereader. Like all Boox devices, this approach is best suited for the tech-savvy. Unlike a Kindle or Kobo, which come preconfigured with a store and easy library-book access, Boox ereaders offer little hand-holding in setup and usage. While there is a store, it’s made up of public domain titles — most people will read books by uploading ePubs manually or through ereader apps like Kobo, Kindle, Libby and others from the built-in Google Play store.

Boox’s built-in ereader app, NeoReader, is nicely featured with a good amount of control over the look of the text. But it only handles DRM-free ePubs from sites like Project Gutenberg or publishers like Tor. If you want to read ePubs with digital rights management, which make up the vast majority of current ebooks, you’ll need to use a different app. Ironically, I’ve been using PocketBook’s ereader app to read DRM ePubs I bought from third parties.

The tablet is impressively customizable, with programmable buttons and fine-tunable settings. Boox users have created APK files to tweak and improve the experience further. The device even has a microphone and speakers, and can run apps like Spotify. In short, the Go Color 7 can do far more than a typical ereader can, if you’re willing to experiment.

The reading experience is enhanced with a soft, adjustable front light with temperature control that makes for pleasant low-light reading and the flush, glare-free, screen is lush and detailed. Like all color ereaders, you do give up a modicum of clarity to accommodate the color array, and the warmth is noticeably more yellow. I only noticed the contrast when I set comparable ereaders side-by-side and, really, it’s the difference between a super duper crisp screen and only a super crisp screen.

The soft and muted colors have a saturated look like watercolors or old comic book illustrations. Comparing the same book cover on the Kobo Clara Colour and this, the Boox hues do look a touch grainier and less rich. But that’s a small sacrifice if you need an ereader that can do far more than just carry your books around.

Screen size: 6.13” Resolution: 300 dpi | Capacity: 128GB | Water resistant: Yes, splashes and spills | Warm light: Yes | Lock screen ads: No

Boox makes two sizes of its ereader. The Poke 5 is smaller than the Page, doesn’t have buttons and goes for about $80 less. But after trying it, I don’t recommend it. It’s laggy and getting the Google Play Store to work was a pain. Once I did, page turns in apps like Kindle were excruciatingly slow.

The Boox Palma, however, is quite fun. It’s the same size and shape as a smartphone and, in a lot of ways, acts like one. The home screen is a muted black and white version of what you might find on a standard Android — you can even add a few widgets. Like the Page, it can download and run apps from the Google Play Store and has speakers to play music and videos. The E Ink screen (a Carta 1200) renders text crisply, but images, particularly moving ones, look far grainier and rougher than they would on a real phone’s LED screen. That said, the video quality is the best I’ve seen on an E Ink screen, thanks to a software improvement Boox calls Super Refresh Technology.

But make no mistake, it’s not going to replace your phone. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are the only connectivity and the 16MP camera is just for making document scans you can convert to PDFs. But the phone-like build is comfortingly familiar and the E Ink screen is lovely to read. At $280, it’s more expensive than a standard ereader — and some E Ink tablets — but it’s a highly portable way to read Kindle, Kobo, Google Books and other ePubs, while also handling simple games and apps like a smartphone. If you’re sick of the glow of your handset, the Boox Palma is a charming alternative.