The e-reader madness begins with the Kobo Clara Colour

And the first contender enters the fray...

Starting out as an e-commerce book store with ample access to capital has really allowed Amazon to dominate in the ebook and e-reader space. Capturing an eye-watering 83% of global e-book market sales when including their Kindle Unlimited subscriptions, there is very little market left for competition. In my little corner of the world, the UK, Amazon have a stranglehold on 87.9% of the ebook market. If that doesn't count as a monopoly, what does exactly?

Even with so little market left for everyone else, I've been determined to figure out what Amzon-free e-reading looks like and how close I can get to a similar offering to the Amazon eco-system. What this means in practice is the following:

• Waterproof. I shall read in rain, and bath and generally in the bathroom and poor weather conditions and you shan't stop me
• The ability to read my existing e-book library. I was a dumb dumb and somehow managed to entirely miss this nice little script that would have saved me and entire evening and nearly 3k clicks so now I am invested in getting maximum utility from my reclaimed e-library to make my suffering feel worthwhile
• On-device book purchases, because I like to dip my toe into series and then absolutely storm through them immediately if I like them
• A nice low backlight for reading in bed at night when my partner is asleep so they don't end up hating me
• Dark mode because I am a cave-dwelling trash goblin and bright lights hurt my rubbish eyes
• Fits in my pocket because I don't always want to bring a bag places
• Syncs my reading progress and position to my phone for seamless reading transfer. No, it's not always because I want to read on the toilet. Sometimes it's because I'm too lazy to go looking for where I put my e-reader
• A comfortable reading experience. I have smaller hands so I want an e-reader that is lightweight and reduces pressure on my wrists while reading. I also want something that won't hurt too much if I accidently drop it on my face... I wish I was joking

I thought about including the ability to sync audiobooks with their respective e-books in this list, but it's a feature I've only used a handful of times. This is mainly because I often can't really justify buying the audiobook version of a book I already have.

However, because I won't be bringing it up again, I'll tangent a little here with a cool project I came across, but have yet to experiment with. Storyteller is an open source project you can host yourself that allows you to sync your audiobooks with their respective e-books. It has compatible iOS and Android apps, but lacks the ability to work with something like a jailbroken Kindle. They have a Discord group that's pretty active and responsive, so if it sounds like something you'd be interested in you can get started pretty easily with PikaPods for less than £8 a month running costs. They also have a revenue sharing agreement with PikaPods so if you spin up your own Storyteller instance it also helps fund the project, which I think is a great way to support free and open source software. I just think it seems neat.

I decided that the best place to start when it came to unKindle-ing would be to have a look at what people who had already done it recommended. The first option that sprang up was Kobo.

Kobo are a Canadian-based company that is a subsidiary of Rakuten, a Japanese e-commerce company that is like the Japanese version of Amazon. Rakuten acquired Kobo in 2011, 4 years later they also bought the ebook side of Waterstones' business when they were struggling to financially justify continuing with it. Another company worth mentioning here is Tolino, a German ereader brand that was originally made by Sony and owned by German bookstore Thalia. In 2013 it became owned by the Tolino Alliance which comprised of Thalia, Weltbild, Hugendubel and Libri and Deutsche Telekom. In 2017 Rakuten Kobo bought out Deutsche Telekom's shares and became a partner in the Tolino Alliance. Now the Tolino Alliance is made up of Thalia, Weltbild, Hugendubel, Mayersche Buchhandlung and Osiander, Libri and others, with Kobo supplying the devices and technical expertise.

So clearly Kobo are also in the business of growing through acquisition, similarly to Amazon, but they also seem more open and willing to work in partnership with businesses against their common gigantic Amazon competitor. Being a big business conglomerate, Rakuten are not without their own problems, and the company is run by yet another billionaire. However, in this instance I figured I needed to pick my battles. Or pick my billionaire, I suppose.

So the first e-reader I bought outside Amazon, was the Kobo Clara Colour for £137 total because:

• It is waterproof with an IPX8 rating which means you can accidently drop it in the bath and as long as your bath isn't more than 2 metres deep and you don't take a full hour or more to fish it out, it will be fine
• I can buy e-books from the Kobo store right on the device after setting up a payment method
• I can read my reclaimed Kindle e-books on it with minimal restrictions on supported formats as long as they're not DRM protected*
• It is a dinky 6" so even more pocket-sized than my Paperwhite
• It has dark mode*
• It has brightness and warmth adjustment for the frontlight* with nice gesture settings so you don't have to open the menu to adjust
• It has iOS and Android apps that track reading progress between devices*
• It is lighter and less cumbersome than my Paperwhite, weighing 31g less and sitting more comfortably in my tiny hobbit hands

It also has a colour screen which was new and exciting, and boasts of using recycled and ocean-bound plastic for the device. Kobo also markets their devices as repairable, and are partnered with ifixit, so if anything goes wrong it isn't likely to become instant e-waste.

But you might have noticed the asterisks I've added to this list. These are all the places where I have experienced some niggling annoyance that is just not quite what I was hoping for. The micro-disappointments. I want to be clear that I do genuinely enjoy my Kobo Clara Colour and there are lots of things about it I prefer over Kindle, but before we get to those, let's get stuck into the snags first.

Snag #1

Dark mode only works when you're reading. The home page can't be switched to dark mode. If you exit your book, you're getting blinded in the middle of the night. Not fun. Also, if there's an image on the page there's often this mild light flash on page turn as the page momentarily seems to blip out of dark mode to render the image.

Snag #2

Again this is do do with lighting on the device. My paperwhite has extremely even front lighting. If you really hunt for it there are maybe miniscule spots near the very edge that are the tiniest weeniest bit brighter than the rest of the screen, but it's almost imperceptible unless you really go looking for it. It creates this really pleasant flat lighting effect that doesn't make it feel like you're reading a lit screen at all.

The Kobo Clara Colour seems to be mostly lit from the bottom and the gaps between where the lighting is set in and the bezels start is large. This leads to a lot of light bleed, especially up the page. If you like to read in bed with the screen at an angle, like I do, it really washes out the bottom of the page, especially in dark mode. So even though it's not terrible for night-time reading, I have to admit it's an inferior experience to using my Kindle Paperwhite, which was quite disappointing.

Snag #3

This is one of the big ones for me. It's why I couldn't make myself just buy this e-reader and move on with my life. It's the ecosystem lock-in. The Kobo Clara Colour doesn't give you a way to wirelessly sideload e-books or audiobooks. Meaning out of the box I could only add my existing digital library to my Kobo by physically plugging it into my computer.

No wireless sideloading options at all? So rubbish. I bought these digital books. I'm not flogging them on a torrent site or anything. I paid for them fair and square. Let me easily read all my books Kobo!

It just feels so anti-user. Here I am migrating my digital library to a new ecosystem, spending my money on a new device, committing to buying my future e-books in their store, and they want to penalise me for what? Being an Amazon customer in the past? They can't realistically expect me to just wave bye bye to my nearly 300 e-books and comics and then rebuy them all again in the Kobo store, surely? That is, if they're even all available via Kobo, which is not guaranteed due to Amazon exclusivity deals and things with some authors. It's a move that just feels hostile and greedy.

Snag #4

If the lack of wireless sideloading wasn't already annoying, it gets worse. You can only access the sideloaded book on the device or app you added it to. If you also upload the same book to your Kobo phone app, it won't sync progress between the books on both devices. Unless you've bought the book from the Kobo store, you cannot sync reading progress across devices.

I was so disappointed. How was I going to read on the toilet now? Did they expect me to remember page numbers like some sort of non-trash-based human being? Functionally, there is basically no difference between a Kobo e-book and a sideloaded one, so why not let me track it? It's a lacking feature that just feels like they're trying to punish me for ever being willing to buy e-books from somewhere that wasn't Kobo. Totally rubbish.

This gets even worse with audiobooks, in an experience I can only describe as borderline unusable. Firstly, you need to make sure your audiobooks are in .mp3 or .mp3z format. Not ideal but I can live with that. What I can't live with is that once you've got it on your device, it uses an entirely different audiobook app to the one it uses for Kobo-bought audiobooks. This alternative audiobook player for sideloaded books is abysmal. It feels like it was designed by someone that actively hates me. It doesn't automatically go to the next chapter when the current one ends, you have to press Next chapter every time. The forward and back options don't seem to work at all. There's no way to go to a different point in the same chapter that I could find that actually works. It crashes and disables bluetooth in the process so you have to go in and turn it on again and re-connect your headphones. It's truly terrible. A terrible, terrible thing made by people who really don't want you to bring your own audiobooks to their device.

Despite my disappointment, I was determined to try and make this work for me. Which brings us to the first big positive for Kobo.

Plus point #1

Kobo has a bit more of an open system overall than Kindle. First off, they do let you download your e-books to your computer. No holding your library completely hostage. You also don't need to jailbreak a Kobo to make a number of software modifications. There are various quality of life Kobo hacks out there, and as I'm in tech, I have the skillset for this.

I'm not the type of software engineer that generally enjoys having their own coding side projects outside of work, but I had so much fun tinkering with the guts of my Kobo Clara Colour and seeing what I could do. I was genuinely excited to finish work and go and sit in front of another screen for hours with a terminal window open. I should note though, that there are still limitations on what's easily possible. Some recent device changes have crippled community customisation projects for Kobo devices, so there is still the possibility of futher future lock-downs on Kobo devices.

I was able to add some nice little quality of life improvements and experiment with various potential syncing solutions fairly trivially. It usually amounted to simply dumping a KoboRoot.tgz into the .kobo directory on the device with maybe a config file or something. Apart from the KOReader install that my Kobo Clara Colour threw up like food poisoning, all the things I tried were as strightforward to install as they were to uninstall, meaning the risk of bricking the device felt low. Though the only little hack I kept in the end was NickelClock because I like being able to check the time as I read so I can pretend I'm not going to stay up to late this time.

Plus point #2

The UI is really nice. Unlike Kindle, the Kobo menu doesn't constantly obfuscate your already purchased books in favour of trying to get you to buy new ones. There are a couple of text snippets at the bottom of the menu encouraging you to get Kobo Plus, but the whole rest of the screen is just your books. This is especially nice with a colour e-ink screen because the covers look so nice. It really makes choosing what to read next a real treat. The screen is also nice and responsive too, so navigating your books just feels really pleasant. It's a UI that feels like it wants you to read, not just buy.

The gesture controls for brightness and warmth are also really smooth and nice to use as you're reading if you need to adjust at all. I also like the good number of font options, and that it lets you set the weight of the font to your preference in the Advanced tab of the reading menu. It's one of the few e-readers where I felt like I was able to get the text looking exactly how I wanted.

Plus point #3

This might be a controversial one but I really like how not premium my Kobo Clara Colour feels. Hear me out, hear me out. The plastic has this rough texture that I just really like. This is definitely one of those personal textual preference things, but it has practical benefits too. I don't have to worry about smudgy fingerprint marks all over it. All my smooth e-readers just look grotty to me after ten mins in my clammy mitts. The texture also makes the Kobo Clara Colour nice and grippy, so I don't get that sweaty sliding grip feeling while I'm holding it at all. I also don't have to adjust how I hold it as much because it doesn't feel like it's trying to slip out of my hand. I just find this really pleasant and satisfying.

I also like the tall bezels. I would fat thumb my Kindle Paperwhite all the time, accidently skipping forward or back a bunch of pages because there was no delineation between the touchscreen and the sides. I really dislike flush touchscreens on e-readers. Some people love it, but I just find it less ergonomic and more prone to accidental swipes or taps.

Add in how extremely light this e-reader is at 174g and the Kobo Clara Colour really feels like it was designed for me. It single-handedly sold me on 6 inch e-readers as the exact form-factor I'm looking for, for a comfortable read. I love designs that prioritise function and comfort, and the Kobo Clara Colour really excels in those areas for me.

Verdict

While the screen brightness can really make the colours pop for an e-ink colour screen (they all still tend to be somewhat desaturated due to the current limitations of the colour e-ink tech available), the lighting is noticeably uneven, causing a bottom up washed-out look, especially when reading at different angles or in dark mode. It's also just too bright at times for night reading because the light settings can't go as low as my Kindle Paperwhite, and not having dark mode for the menu is an annoying choice.

The lack of reading progress sync support and wireless syncing for the Kobo Clara Colour feels stingy and mean-spirited. If you've already bought a book elsewhere, hindering how you can use it with an e-reader device just feels like a stupid choice. If the majority of the market you want to compete for belongs to a giant monopology, you're going to make it a lot easier for customers to switch to you if you make migrating away from that monopoly as seamless as possible. Customers are going to want to bring their existing e-book library with them and facilitating that will only help you with user adoption.

If you don't have an existing Kindle library, or you only have a very small Kindle library to migrate, and you don't care about syncing reading progress across different devices, the Kobo Clara Colour is a pretty practical device. However, there is nothing about it that delivers the same premium and high-quality polished look and feel you get with Kindle, though the recycled materials used to make it and repairability are admirable and something more companies should be doing. The ecosystem it offers is comparible to Kindle, but unfortunately with similar lock-in, and while they're a bit more permissive than Kindle when it comes to customisation, this feels incidental rather than deliberate.

Sadly, I can't say I recommend the Kobo Clara Colour for avid Kindle users wanting to de-Amazon. Expecting users not to want easy access to their existing e-book library is simply not acceptable. But if you're new to e-readers and looking for a non-Amazon option, they're going to be the easiest option to get ahold of with a comparably smooth ecosystem to Kindle if you only intend to purchase e-books from their store.

Next week I'll be taking a look at the various options I explored trying to fix the lack of wireless syncing and reading progress tracking for sideloaded e-books on the Kobo. See you then!