After Kobo released three new ereaders at the end of last month, and then discontinued their most popular and best selling model earlier this month without releasing a direct replacement, their current line of ereaders is rather confusing now and doesn’t make much sense when you look at it as a whole.
Some people didn’t want to believe it when I said the Kobo Libra 2 was being discontinued, but there’s no doubting that fact now that Kobo has removed the Libra 2 from their main ereader product page. There are still a few left on Amazon, but it’s selling for $10 above MSRP.
Now the Libra model is only available with a color E Ink screen in the form of the Libra Colour, and some people don’t like that and want a regular black and white screen for reading text because of the notable drawbacks inherent with color E Ink technology.
On one hand Kobo is only giving customers the option to buy a color model when it comes to the 7″ Libra, but then when it comes to 6″ models they offer three different versions with black and white screens and one with color.
To make things even more confusing, the three black and white models are all priced within $30 of each other.
At $109, the Kobo Nia should have been discontinued years ago. It’s outdated and it lacks a bunch of upgrades that come on the new Kobo Clara BW, so why are they still selling it?
For an extra $20, the Kobo Clara BW adds waterproofing, an upgraded screen with better contrast and higher resolution, a warm frontlight, it has double the storage space, it adds dual-band WiFi support and Bluetooth for listening to audiobooks, it adds Dark Mode, it has a faster processor, it has a USB-C port instead of the older microUSB port, and the new Kobos are all user repairable, unlike the Nia.
There’s also the fact that Kobo is still selling the previous generation Clara 2E alongside the new Clara BW, and they’re still charging full price for the Clara 2E at $139 despite the fact the new model costs $10 less. The two models are nearly identical, but the Clara BW has a newer Carta 1300 E Ink screen, which is supposed to be better but it’s really not. It is a bit faster but the black ink actually looks darker on the Clara 2E’s Carta 1200 screen.
Then there’s the 10″ Kobo Elipsa and Kobo Elipsa 2E. Again, both are virtually identical, expect the 2E adds a warm frontlight. The Elipsa 2E was released over a year ago, so why is Kobo still selling the previous generation Elipsa as well?
Most companies phase out older models when a new version is released, but apparently Kobo only does that to models that people really like, like the Libra 2.
