E-readers have been one of the greatest single-purpose gadgets for almost three decades. They offer an escape from technology and the endless distraction of mobile phones, despite also being tech devices.
But that is starting to change. Colour ebook readers, for graphic novels, magazines and books, are now fairly common, and there are several models designed for note-taking. Plus, a whole family of these devices uses Android, meaning they can run all of those apps that often distract from reading.
The core components of almost every e-reader remain the same, though. They use E Ink displays –much more relaxing than a phone or tablet screen, which pelt your eyes with light. And they can last for up to weeks between charges: low upkeep is key.
Are e-readers still needed now that we always have phones in our pockets, often with larger displays? Absolutely. They’re as relevant as they’ve ever been. Contrary to what some may think, there’s more to the world of ebook readers than only Amazon Kindles. Here we’ll get to the bottom of the strengths and weaknesses of all of the best e-readers, including Kindle rivals from Kobo, Onyx Boox and others.
It’s time to pull yourself away from the hellscape of social media – settle down with a calming apocalypse fiction ebook instead.
At a glance
Best e-reader overall:
Kindle Paperwhite
£124.99 at AmazonBest colour e-reader:
Kobo Libra Colour
£179 at CurrysBest affordable e-reader:
Kobo Clara BW
£119 at AmazonBest phone-style e-reader:
Onyx Boox Palma 2
€299 at Boox
Why you should trust me
I have read books primarily on an e-reader since I bought the first mainstream model launched in the UK, Sony’s PRS-505 from 2007.
I’ve reviewed them professionally since 2013, for several websites and magazines. And I’ve had the chance to watch the fall of Sony as the biggest Amazon Kindle rival, followed by the rise of Kobo and Onyx Boox since.
I’ve also had a chance to see many years’ worth of trade-show demos of the current top e-reader trend: colour E Ink. My, have colour readers taken a long time to arrive.
How I tested
There is no effective benchmark for e-readers. Measuring the brightness of the screens doesn’t tell you much. You can test the power of their computing brains, but that says little about how they feel to use.
While I’ve performed those empirical tests on 11 devices for this article, choosing the best e-reader is much more about how they feel to use in everyday life. You don’t truly know one until you’ve been jolted awake after dropping it on your face half a dozen times, having nodded off while reading in bed.
Rigorous real-world testing involves multiple sessions of reading in the bath, using them on public transport and reading under library strip lighting to check out screen glare. Just as important, I also used each e-reader’s bookstore. It’s important to question not only how good the book selection is, but also how good its discovery tools are and how easy it is to buy a book, or try samples.
I had to look beyond novels and PDFs on some readers, too. Do the colour displays actually make comics, graphic novels and magazines look good, and are the pages easy to navigate? I also made notes on the readers that support note-taking with a stylus to find out how easy that is.
Inevitably, a few elements come down to pure preference. For example, whether you prefer turning the page with a button or a touchscreen is simply a matter of taste. But in a category where the experience is everything, this one had to be judged by my real-world use.
Here’s my guide to the eight best e-readers from my testing.
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The best e-readers for 2024
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Best overall:
Kindle Paperwhite
The Paperwhite was originally released to show off Amazon’s lit E Ink screen tech in 2012. Since then it has settled in to become Amazon’s easiest-to-recommend e-reader for most buyers.
It’s a mature series that suffers from none of the first-generation teething problems of the new colour-screen Kindle Colorsoft, and it costs a whole lot less, too. This is the embodiment of the idea that an e-reader should be a gadget with a single job.
Why we love it
This generation of Paperwhite fits a larger 7in screen into a smaller casing than last time around. The display can comfortably cram more words on to each page and contributes to what is a great-looking design.
The entirely flat edge-to-edge screen surface eliminates screen shadows. Curved corners make it seem more friendly and the soft-touch back feels great, while the water resistance offers bath-time insurance.
A Paperwhite is also a beautiful canvas for novels. Its surface is much purer and cleaner than a spotlight-stealing Kindle Colorsoft, and performance has been massively improved in this generation, speeding up those evenings searching for a new read on the Kindle Store.
It’s a shame that … there’s no Kindle with physical buttons for sale after the Kindle Oasis was discontinued in 2024. It’s not necessarily the Paperwhite’s job to fill that gap, but it is a reason to consider a non-Kindle rival instead. There are also a few features only found in the pricier Signature Edition: wireless charging, automatic screen brightness and larger storage options.
Display: 7in monochrome E Ink
Storage size: 16/32GB
Dimensions: 127.5 x 176.7 x 7.8mm
Weight: 211g
The prices below reflect current Black Friday offers
£124.99 at Amazon
£124.99 at John Lewis
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Best colour e-reader:
Kobo Libra Colour
The Libra Colour is Kobo’s larger colour-screen e-reader, with a 7in display and an E Ink Kaleido 3 panel.
Among the main pluses here is its significantly lower price compared with other colour-screen rivals, the Amazon Kindle Colorsoft and the Onyx Boox Go Color 7.
Why we love it
Comfy page-turn buttons may not be among the Libra Colour’s star features, but they will make some fall in love with this e-reader. It’s not just that page turns now require next to zero movement: the slight curvature of the casing also hugs your thumb for better ergonomics. It’s lovely.
Kobo finely balances features and complexity in the Libra Colour. It supports note-taking, and integrates with Google Drive and Dropbox, but still retains that all-important simplicity.
As one of the first wave of mainstream colour e-readers, it’s also suitable for a wider range of content than traditional devices.
It’s a shame that … as with all current colour e-readers, the page surface looks much greyer and less clean than on the best monochrome readers. When turning the page on colour content, the onscreen refreshes are slower and more ugly-looking.
Adjust your expectations on the punchiness of the colour, too, because E Ink’s colour richness isn’t anything like that of an OLED screen. And while you can borrow graphic novels from a local library using the OverDrive platform, this requires using the headache-inducing Adobe Digital Editions.
Display: 7in colour E Ink
Storage: 32GB
Dimensions: 144.6 x 161 x 8.3mm
Weight: 199.5g
The prices below reflect current Black Friday offers
£179 at Currys
£179.99 at Argos
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Best affordable e-reader:
Kobo Clara BW
The Clara BW is Kobo’s main rival to the standard Kindle. It’s a simple black-and-white e-reader, with a 6in screen and a frame narrow enough to fit in many a coat pocket.
It combines a non-flashy, budget-conscious approach to design with an aggressive corralling of features – including some that Amazon holds back for its higher-end Paperwhite model.
Why we love it
Although you can tell from a glance that this e-reader is a more humble model, it’s remarkably feature-rich. The screen light can be much warmer-looking at night-time, to help avoid it affecting your sleep. It’s also IPX8 water resistant, to handle being dunked in 2m-deep water for up to an hour – so it’s bath-time reading approved.
Now, I used e-readers in the bath long before they were water-resistant, and I’m not a huge fan of a super-warm-looking reader screen – but the Clara BW will win over even such picky people with its fantastic E Ink Carta 1300 display. The page surface is lighter than on older tech e-readers, providing better contrast. After-image ghosting is reduced and page turns are a little faster too. This all means you get an ultra-clean and clear reproduction of books, mining that ebook reader appeal all the more.
While the Clara BW isn’t hugely cheap, it will save you money in the long run: it has OverDrive, a platform used in many UK libraries, built in. You can borrow ebooks for two weeks a piece without spending a penny.
It’s a shame that … Kobo’s take on OverDrive can be a headache, as only books available on the Kobo Store will appear when you search. To see the full library, you may need to use the OverDrive app on your phone.
The Clara BW also lacks the note-taking stylus feature of the Libra family.
Display: 6in monochrome E Ink
Storage: 16GB
Dimensions: 112 x 160 x 9.2mm
Weight: 174g
£119 at Amazon
£119.99 at Argos
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Best phone-style e-reader:
Onyx Boox Palma 2
The Onyx Palma 2 looks like a phone. It feels like a phone. And it can do almost everything a phone can – but it can’t take calls or send SMS messages because there’s no SIM slot.
Still, the style’s ideal if you need to read one-handed – while wedged into a train carriage on the way to work, for example.
Why we love it
Simultaneously “out there” and obvious, the Palma 2 is an E Ink almost-phone that just lacks the ability to make calls. The Boox book store is onboard, but so is the Android Google Play app store.
Any app or game you might use on an Android phone is only a few taps away, making the Palma 2 radically more versatile, and more powerful, than the average e-reader. Constantly need to read work emails and reports while travelling? Just install an email client.
There’s even a 16MP camera on the back. While it won’t compete with the camera of a decent phone, it has an optical character recognition feature baked in, so you can digitise any document you take a picture of. It’s the Swiss army knife of e-readers.
It’s a shame that … all that versatility robs the Palma 2 of the simplicity so highly valued in an e-reader. To get the ideal experience, you have to switch between four different screen modes, depending on which app you’re using. Is it fast motion you want, or a clearer-looking image? And the recessed screen causes shadows, which become all the more obvious with a screen this small.
At times, you wonder why Onyx didn’t go the whole way and just add a SIM slot. It already has a tray for a microSD card, after all.
Display: 6.13in monochrome E Ink screen
Storage: 128GB
Dimensions: 159 × 80 × 8mm
Weight: 170g
This product is sold in euros but ships from the UK. At the time of writing, this is equivalent to £250.69.
€299 at Boox
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The best of the rest
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Onyx Boox Go Color 7
Best for: handling virtually any kind of content
A super-versatile colour e-reader that can do more than most. It has dedicated page-turn buttons and, since it runs Android apps, you can install all sorts of reader apps and bookstores.
We found it needed a little too much tweaking to get the most out of it, though. The default power settings lead to infuriating boot-up waits and auto-rotate woes. The front light isn’t the most consistent, either.
Still, the sheer breadth of possibilities will put it above the rival Kindle and Kobo models for some. It can even run Netflix and has built-in speakers. Is it ideal for movies, though? Absolutely not.
It didn’t make the cut because … it requires interface tweaks that some buyers may not even find, and its front light isn’t as consistent as those of its rivals.
£249.99 at Amazon
£249.99 at The Dyslexia Shop
Display: 7in Kaleido 3 colour E Ink; storage: 64GB; dimensions: 156 × 137 × 6.4mm; Weight: 190g
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Kobo Elipsa 2E
Best for: note-taking, and for larger-format reads such as graphic novels
This 10.3in tablet-size e-reader is one of the most affordable routes to a larger note-taking E Ink slate. It lets you write notes directly on to books using the included stylus. Or you can use the Advanced notebook feature to have your scribbles automatically turned into digital type.
Its plastic body isn’t quite as slick as the metal Kindle Scribe, but it’s almost 50g lighter in return. The Elipsa can also read more formats without needing to convert the files, and the system-level support for integrations with Dropbox, Google Drive and Pocket is ideal.
It didn’t make the cut because … it’s a bit too clunky for some of the situations when an e-reader really shines, like reading in bed.
Display: 10.3in monochrome E Ink; storage: 32GB; dimensions: 193 x 227 x 7.5mm; weight: 390g
The prices below reflect current Black Friday offers
£299.99 at Amazon
£299.99 at Kobo
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Kindle (2024)
Best for: reading on the go, in a coat-pocket-friendly format
There’s nothing wrong with the bog-standard Kindle. Its display light is actually much brighter than the Kindle Paperwhite’s. Surprising, right? It looks as cute as anything in Amazon’s new matcha green finish and is much more coat-pocket-friendly than the pricier Kindles. This will be love at first sight for many.
It’s very similar to the 2022 version, though, new colour aside. And for not much more money, Kobo’s Clara BW provides several meaningful extra features. That said, if you already have a healthy to-read pile on Kindle, it’s still a cracking e-reader.
It didn’t make the cut because … while we love that matcha green, Kobo squeezed in more features at a comparable price.
The prices below reflect current Black Friday offers
£79.99 at Amazon
£79.99 at John Lewis
Display: 6in monochrome E Ink; storage: 16GB; dimensions: 157.8 x 108.6 x 8mm; weight: 158g
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TCL 50 Pro
Best for: acting like a phone 95% of the time, because it is one
TCL promises “ebook-like immersion” with this reader-friendly phone. It’s a reasonably priced Android, but it doesn’t have a classic E Ink screen. Instead, it’s LCD with an unusual matte finish. When you flick a switch on the side, it enters a monochrome low-distraction mode, one that’s a dead ringer for an e-reader interface.
While a solid phone, you don’t really get the particular eye-balm-like benefits of E Ink tech here: it’s still a backlit phone. A novel concept, but one a little more ordinary than you may assume.
It didn’t make the cut because … it’s too much of a phone and not quite enough of an e-reader.
Display: 6.8in IPS LCD; storage: 512GB; dimensions: 167.6 x 75.5 x 8mm; weight: 196g
The prices below reflect current Black Friday offers
£229 at Very
£229.99 at Argos
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What you need to know
How much should you spend?
Good e-readers start at about £100. The cheapest Kindle is just slightly below that; the most affordable Kobo is a little above.
If you’re not in a desperate rush to get hold of an e-reader, consider waiting for one of the major sales periods. There are often excellent discounts during Black Friday, Prime Day and other similar discount events.
What are the key factors to look for?
Every e-reader these days has the one feature that levelled up the category most significantly since its inception: the front light. In the early days, you needed a decent amount of ambient light to use an e-reader; now they’re ideal for reading in the dark.
One more recent addition is colour temperature control. Some readers can cut out blue light at night in an attempt to prevent it from disrupting your sleep. However, this does make the light appear orange, and some folks have no problem falling asleep while reading a more “cool” light e-reader anyway. You can trust us on that one.
Should you buy a colour e-reader?
Colour e-readers are hot stuff at the moment, but they come with compromises.
First up, they’re more expensive than the monochrome kind. Their displays appear less clean and pure thanks to the way colour E Ink works, and the display refresh that’s needed on any E Ink device is far more jarring and noticeable.
But perhaps the biggest problem with colour E Ink readers is that most of them are relatively small and, therefore, not best-suited to their number-one job – reading graphic novels and comics.
The best e-readers for that task come from Onyx Boox, which has produced larger tablet-style E Ink devices for a while now. However, they’re quite expensive, starting at €550 for the latest models in the Tab and Note series. As such, they’re not all that easy to recommend, despite being unusual, versatile and ambitious devices.
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Andrew Williams is a freelance consumer journalist who has written about technology since before the first iPhone came out. As his flat is filled with the cardboard boxes of gadgets, he tries to get out for a run to avoid them whenever possible – often while testing a fitness tracker and a phone camera at the same time
