One interesting detail that came out yesterday when Kobo announced the upcoming release of the new Kobo Libra Colour and Kobo Clara models is the fact that they are going to sell repair kits for them so people can replace parts when/if they break.
They haven’t revealed any specific details about this yet, so we don’t know exactly what will be replaceable, but this is what it says on the product pages for the new models: “This eReader is also repairable, so you can extend its life and replace key components.”
There’s a link to this Repair your Kobo eReader help page on Kobo’s website that says the following:
Rakuten Kobo is partnering with iFixit, the leader in the technology repairability space, making it easy for customers to extend the life of their eReader by replacing common components.
They go on to say this will only be an option for the new models, including the Kobo Libra Colour, the Kobo Clara Colour and the Kobo Clara BW. They say they’ll add more information later on how everything works and how to order repair kits.
This is great news for Kobo customers, as none of the other ereader companies offer anything like this. You can pay an arm and a leg to send Boox devices back to China to get them repaired, but they don’t sell any user-repairable kits.
It’ll be interesting to see exactly what kind of repair kits Kobo will offer. The two most common things to wear out and break on ereaders is the battery and the screen. If those things are user-replaceable on these new Kobos that’s a pretty big deal.
I was critical of Kobo when they started bragging about using recycled plastic on their ereaders without making the batteries user-replaceable, but now it seems like they really are going all-in on sustainability instead of just trying to win over the social media crowd so that’s good to see.
Very glad to see this! It is disgusting how much of a throwaway society we have become. Corporations designing products to fail isn’t helping either.
Pre-ordered a Kobo Libra Colour yesterday!
Kudos to Kobo indeed, but obviously they’ve got their eyes on forthcoming EU legislation requiring the repairability of consumer electronic devices, aka “Right to Repair”. Clearly the giants like Apple and Samsung are the main targets of this legislation, but ereaders are on the list too. Partnering with someone like iFixit seems like a good decision.
Kudos to Ratta as well for their repairable new Supernote model(s).
Great news. These should be durable goods. I just wish I didn’t have so many Amazon books. If I didn’t I’d switch to Kobo today.
As someone who did switch, it is very much worth doing. Kobo’s software is far better than Kindle. Downloading your books and stripping DRM is not that hard, although it can be tedious.
You can switch your kindle books to kobo, I just did it, check the kobo subreddit for how tos!
This is great news. I’m a big supporter of right to repair and I wish it were a country wide law here too in the States. I’m not in the market for an e reader currently but if I was I’d buy one of these three.
Even if all that is “repairable” is a easy replaceable battery or a e ink panel this is a great way to keep our beloved reading devices running longer.