Other Good Ebook Readers
Below, you’ll find a few more e-readers we like but don’t necessarily love as much as our top picks.
Kindle Scribe
Photograph: Brenda Stolyar
Kindle Scribe 2024 for $400: The Scribe (8/10, WIRED Review) is a great option if you want an e-reader that doubles as a digital notebook, but also want to remain within the Kindle ecosystem. It has a 10.2-inch (300 ppi) paperlike display with features like adjustable warm light and an auto-adjusting front light. The included Premium Pen also has a soft-tipped eraser (mimicking that of a No.2 pencil). With Active Canvas and expandable margins, you can also mark up ebooks and write notes in the side panel.
Nook GlowLight 4 Plus for $180: The 4 Plus is the only waterproof Nook in the lineup, and it has the biggest screen at 7.8 inches, along with 32 GB of storage. It also has physical page-turn buttons and a headphone jack for listening to audiobooks (but you can also connect wireless earbuds via Bluetooth). But it was often slower than my Kindle and tended to freeze. While the large library has cheap and even free ebooks, it’s not as good a selection as Kindle Unlimited. The process of getting a book from the library on a Nook is also beyond frustrating. You’ll need to download either Adobe Digital Editions or Android File Transfer before connecting the device to your computer physically and then transferring the files.
Kindle Colorsoft
Photograph: Brenda Stolyar
Kindle Colorsoft for $280: The Kindle Colorsoft (7/10, WIRED Review) is Amazon’s first Kindle with a color screen. It has a screen with an oxide backplane, which Amazon says delivers better contrast and image quality along with custom-formulated coatings and nitride LEDs for brightness and color accuracy. But the screen is capped at 150 ppi for color images, versus 300 ppi for black and white, and the experience of reading is still a little fuzzier when compared to the latest Paperwhite. It takes noticeably longer to process color images, too. It’s missing features that are by now standard on other color e-readers, like page turn buttons and stylus support. It’s not a bad Kindle, and color does enrich the whole e-reading experience, but we suggest waiting for a discount during an Amazon sale event.
Kobo Clara Colour for $160: Kobo’s Clara Colour seems to be disappearing from retail store, so it’s likely that there’s a successor on the way (or Kobo is just nixing it). It’s a shame because I really like it, especially compared to the Kindle Colorsoft. It’s more affordable, but you still get to see book covers or graphic novels in full color, and you can highlight in color too. In testing, I found that some books weren’t as easy on the eyes, like the blue-and-yellow color scheme of Curious George, but that was one small gripe in an otherwise seamless reading experience. The Clara lacks page-turn buttons, but the 6-inch screen size is comfortable for one-handed use. It has 16 gigabytes of storage rather than 32, but that’s still about 12,000 books. There’s Overdrive integration and Bluetooth support. It’s also waterproof, made from recycled materials, and is repairable.
Nook 9-inch Lenovo Tablet for $130: If you mainly read cookbooks or other color-intensive materials, and you want a dedicated reader, you might want to consider this affordable tablet from Nook and Lenovo, which has the Nook app built in (6/10, WIRED Review). As with the tablets mentioned above, you lose the E Ink screen and the distraction-free nature of an e-reader. You can at least turn off notifications while in certain apps, which I recommend doing for the Nook app. It ships with an old version of Android, and it’s not built for heavy work like video or photo editing.
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