Kobo Libra Colour e-reader price hike reversed with $30 discount

Kobo recently raised the price of its Libra Colour e-reader to $259.99, but today's deal effectively erases that hike. The company, Best Buy, and Target are all selling it for its old $229.99 price as part of broader sales, making now one of the best times to grab my favorite alternative to Amazon's Kindle. If you're not heavily invested in Amazon's ecosystem, I think the Kobo Libra Colour is a better buy than its closest Amazon rival, the $249.99 Kindle Colorsoft.

It offers many of the same core features, including a sharp seven-inch color display that makes book covers, comics, and highlights pop with only slightly less vibrancy than the color Kindle. It's also waterproof so you can rest easy at the beach, and features adjustable warm lighting for more comfortable nighttime reading. The Kobo also has a few advantages over Amazon's e-reader.

It supports EPUB and a broader range of file formats, making it easier to read books from a variety of sources, while offering twice as much storage (32GB). Unlike the Colorsoft, the Libra Colour includes physical page-turning buttons, which I find make for a more intuitive reading experience. It also supports Kobo's optional Stylus 2, letting you annotate ebooks, jot down handwritten notes, use built-in notebook templates, and even convert your handwriting into typed text.

Due to its size, I wouldn't recommend it as a dedicated digital notebook over something bigger like the Kobo Elipsa 2E or Kindle Scribe, but it's far more practical for quick notes than using your phone. It also works with Instapaper, making it easy to save web articles for offline reading. The Kobo Libra Colour's price correction comes at a critical time, as the e-reader market continues to evolve.

For developers and businesses, this move by Kobo signals a need to stay competitive in pricing and features. For consumers, the Libra Colour offers a compelling alternative to Amazon's Kindle, particularly for those seeking a device that supports a wide range of file formats and offers more storage. As the market shifts, questions remain about how Amazon will respond to Kobo's competitive pricing and feature set.

Will the Libra Colour's advantages be enough to sway readers away from the Kindle, or will Amazon's ecosystem lock-in continue to dominate? Only time will tell, but for now, the Kobo Libra Colour is an attractive option for those in the market for a versatile e-reader.