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.
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