Ever since Kobo released the Kobo Libra Colour in April of 2024, people have been eagerly waiting for Kobo to release a version with a black-and-white E Ink screen, but it’s been over two years now and it looks like that’s never going to happen.
It would be different if Kobo hadn’t discontinued the Libra 2 right after the KLC was released, leaving people without an option for a 7″ BW Kobo ereader with page buttons after Kobo had been offering that since 2019 when the Libra H2O first came out. But now it’s like Kobo is nudging people toward adopting color E Ink whether they want to or not.
Luckily, there are other devices that fill the void left by the Libra 2 for those that don’t want an ereader with a color E Ink screen and prefer the superior contrast of old school black-and-white E Ink.
The Pocketbook Era Lite is the latest example of such a device. It has a design similar to the Kobo Libra Colour with the page buttons on one side of the screen, and the Era Lite adds two additional buttons, and all four can be programmed for various tasks with long-presses and short-presses.
To me, the Era Lite’s build quality is a step up. It’s not as big as the KLC, and the material feels nicer in-hand than the cheap plastic that Kobo always insists on using.
However, Kobo has the edge in the software department, in my opinion. They offer a lot more font and layout choices for ebooks, the software is faster and better optimized, the built-in ebook store is actually useful, unlike Pocketbook’s, and the KLC supports using a real stylus and thus offers more notetaking functions.
But there are some things the Era Lite is better at in the software department. For one, it supports text-to-speech. It has also supports using multiple libraries through Libby, instead of just one at a time, and it supports borrowing audiobooks from libraries as well, unlike Kobos. And it adds support for LCP DRM too.
Both brands are “open”, in that they support a wide variety of formats, and you can install alternate software like KOReader and custom mods without jailbreaking or having to jump through hoops, like with Kindles.
If Pocketbook would just improve the overall performance of their devices and refine the user interface a little more they could potentially unseat Kobo as the best Kindle alternative. Pocketbook offers a wider variety of reading devices, many with page buttons and external storage, and the build quality of their devices is solid. They should be more popular than they are, especially considering how long they’ve been around (longer than Kobo, in fact).
At $199, the Pocketbook Era Lite is $60 cheaper than the Kobo Libra Colour, which originally sold for $219 in 2024, but Kobo has raised the price twice and now it sells for $259. When they were still selling the Libra 2 it sold for $189, and it came out in 2021, so the Era Lite is competitively priced, and it’s a good alternative to the Kobo Libra BW that still doesn’t exist for reasons unknown.
Did anything ever come out of Pocketbook’s reportedly significant investment into Bigme?
I was hoping for some sort of hardware upgrade for PB, and/or active software developers capable of improving the PB code.
But nada.
The Era Lite is proof that E Ink can supply displays, so it seems it’s entirely Kobo’s fault for not wanting to release any updated BW ereader. There was an interview with the Kobo CEO last year, where you could hear him cautiously avoiding the topic of upcoming ereaders or anything relevant, really.
But they really wouldn’t have to do much… Just release a Libra with the existing Libra Colour hardware and a BW screen. That’s it. This is the only thing they have to do. For starters at least. A Sage successor would be next. Sage with a replaceable battery. Are these so difficult to do?
I have a love/hate relationship with PocketBook ereaders. Their Inkpad 3 Color with a 7.8” screen has my favorite size display, I wish Kobo still offered one like this. But PB’s hardware is so slow that I rarely use mine anymore. I have an Era BW that I like a lot but the same issues exist. Come on PocketBook, fix these issues!
Yes, my Inkpad 3 Color is unusably slow. I won’t buy another Pocketbook.
Same here. I have InkPad 3 Pro and I simply couldn’t use it. Everything takes so long it’s insane. Opening book at least 10 seconds, minutes till it shows how many pages are left in the book etc. And their cloud synchro with mobile app is also horrible. Never again.
I never understood these PB are slow comments. I had an OG inkpad and a touch hd3 and they have been my favourite ereaders to use. The onyx nova pro, now that’s an ereader that was unuseably slow.
I switched from the Kobo Libra Colour to the PocketBook Era Lite a few weeks ago. On the plus side, the Era Lite display is great and crystal clear compared to the Libra, which I personally found subpar and always on the grayer side. The ebook formatting can also be improved easily by making a few tweaks in Calibre. The size is a bit smaller than the Kobo, though the weight is nearly identical. On the minus side, the Era Lite is slow at startup, sluggish when navigating menus while reading, and I still can’t figure out the logic of the home page library display. PocketBook can hopefully fix these quirks through software updates over time. That said, the actual reading experience, which is the main reason to buy an e-reader in the first place, is hard to beat.
Cannot find the era lite for purchase in the US. Not even an out of stock listing.
It’s been in and out of stock lately but it’ll probably be back soon. It’s listed on the same page as the Era Color on Amazon, so when it’s out of stock it doesn’t show up.