I am a longtime fan of ink on paper, at least, as far as taking notes and staying organized is concerned. I’ve written before that I prefer the feel and friction involved with using a notebook for ideas and to-do lists.
I’ve tried digital versions of this process, including the Paperlike screen protector on my iPad Pro. Still, none of them have ever perfectly recreated the experience of writing with a real pen or pencil on real paper.
Recently, however, Remarkable announced the Remarkable Paper Pro Move, which is a very long name for a small color e-ink tablet. I’d previously used the larger version, known as the Paper Pro, but had a hard time figuring out how to fit it into my life. It was just too big.
There’s a trade-off, of course. If I’m going to carry around something this large, it has to offer me more value than the cost associated with its size or weight. With the larger Paper Pro, I haven’t been able to balance out that equation.
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With the smaller version, however, suddenly everything made sense. In fact, after using it for a few months, I’m starting to think it might just be the perfect productivity device.
To be fair, it’s not going to be for everyone. If you’re the kind of person who just uses your email inbox as your main to-do list, this probably isn’t going to work for you. But, if you’re a handwritten list kind of person, there are four reasons you might want to check out the Paper Pro move:
1. It’s close enough
To be fair, this still isn’t like writing on real paper. But the Paper Pro Move is close enough to that experience that I’m willing to use it regularly. It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t have to be. It just has to be comfortable, and it is. There’s enough friction in the experience that it doesn’t feel like you’re writing on a device.
And, the color e-ink screen is good. It’s definitely slower than the Remarkable 2, but I think that’s just physics, and a function of how they work. Like the larger Paper Pro, having color probably is what makes it slower, but I think the trade off is worth it in terms of functionality.
2. It’s small
The only real objection I had to the full-size Paper Pro is that it was just too big to be something I wanted to carry with me all the time. I don’t want another device that’s basically the size of my laptop or iPad.
The Paper Pro Move, however, is small enough that it fits better in my workflow and my carry bag. It’s right in the sweet spot between small enough to carry and big enough to write on without feeling cramped.
That said, it was too small for most of the planner templates I was used to on the bigger version. Thankfully, there’s a pretty active network of people making templates and it didn’t take long at all to find some specifically designed for the Paper Pro Move.
3. It’s infinity notebooks
I guess it’s technically not “infinity,” so to speak. The Paper Pro Move has 64GB of internal storage, which the company says is enough for 100,000 pages of PDF documents. That’s about 83 years’ worth of notebooks if you go through one a month. I assume the backlight will die and the battery will stop holding a charge long before you’ll ever fill up the device’s storage.
The reality is that having all of the notes you take with you all the time is really the reason you would use something like the Remarkable instead of just writing on paper. There’s something very nice about being able to go back to meetings or notes from months ago without having to figure out which notebook I put them in.
4. There are no distractions
Lastly, the killer feature is that the Paper Pro Move has zero distractions. There are no notifications or apps. There’s nothing begging for your attention except whatever you’re working on. That makes it the perfect device for thinking, organizing, and working.
To be honest, I don’t think the Paper Pro Move can ever replace the joy that comes from writing with a pen on paper, but it does about as a good a job as I think is possible at recreating that experience. The real question is whether the benefits from using a digital device are worth it. In this case, I think the answer is yes.
Obviously, this is a premium device, which means it comes with a pretty big price tag. With a Marker Plus and a Folio, it’ll cost you $570. You can buy a pen and paper notebook for like, what, $10? You can get a lot of pens and notebooks for the price of this digital version.
That means it’s definitely not for everyone, and that’s okay. Most people probably shouldn’t spend $570 on a digital notebook, especially if you read this far and still aren’t sure how you’d possibly use this in your life. On the other hand, if you’re a fan of notebooks and pens, and you use both to take notes and organize your ideas, there’s no question this might just be the best productivity device yet.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
You don’t have to look far to find a colorful e-reader, but those of us looking for more note-taking capabilities on a screen without noir sensibilities, choices truly abound. Alongside the reMarkable Paper Pro Move and Amazon Kindle Scribe Colorsoft, in steps Onyx with what may be the smallest E Ink screen on offer with a Boox P6 Pro. This time around, you’ll be able to use the phone-like device with a stylus to turn it into a pocketable, colorful notetaker.
If you weren’t already smitten with the phone-sized Boox Palma, Onyx hopes you may be enticed with a tiny color E Ink display. Onyx kept the new device under wraps at IFA 2025, but The Verge first spotted the company posting about the new device on China-centric social media app Weibo. While the device may look like a phone, including the back camera cutout, the P6 Pro is more akin to a full note-taking device. That 16-megapixel camera is designed for reading QR codes instead of taking photos of friends. However, the P6 Pro will come with a SIM card tray, unlike the Boox Palma, which means you can download apps or comics without relying on a Wi-Fi connection. The new device is likely still based on Android, like past Boox e-readers.
There is another, likely cheaper Boox P6 Pro that will sport a black and white E Ink display. For color, The Verge claims Onyx is using the E Ink Kaleido 3 technology. That means it can display black and white at 300 PPI, or pixels per inch, but comics may come out a little less detailed at the max 150 PPI in color. The touchscreen E Ink device comes with 128GB of internal storage and a microSD card slot for up to 2TB of expanded storage (that’s a lot of books). The microSD card and SIM card slot take up the same space.
None of what Onyx wrote on Weibo indicates that it is selling the Boox P6 Pro as a phone. No matter what, any device with E Ink’s slower refresh rate will feel more limited for daily use. In that case, you may want to pine over the TCL NXTPaper 60 Ultra with its matte screen finish and anti-blue light technology, which helps preserve your eyes when reading page after page on your phone. No, unfortunately that device is not available to purchase in the U.S. Woe to all of us Americans who are forced to stare at screens all day.
Onyx is planning to host a full launch on Oct. 9 where it may hopefully share more about when the P6 Pro could come to the U.S. and how much consumers can expect to pay for it. Color E Ink is still more expensive than LCD e-readers. The reMarkable Paper Pro Move with its 7.3-inch display starts at $450 with the stylus. The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft demands $630, which is the same price as the reMarkable Paper Pro and also includes a stylus.
I’m a longtime lover of pen and paper, so E Ink tablets have been intriguing to me ever since they started becoming more widely available. After having hundreds of half-filled notebooks over the years, I, at some point, turned to digital tools instead because it was just easier to store everything on my phone or laptop so I always had my most important information at my fingertips.
E-Ink tablets seem to provide the best of both worlds: the tactile satisfaction of regular notebooks with many of the conveniences found in digital tools, plus easy-on-the-eyes E-Ink screens. These devices have come a long way in recent years — now you can find them in multiple sizes, some have color E Ink screens and others double as full-blow ereaders with access to ebook stores and your local library’s offerings. I’ve tested out close to a dozen E Ink tablets over the past few years to see how well they work, how convenient they really are and which are the best tablets using E Ink screens available today.
Table of contents
Best E Ink tablets for 2025
reMarkable
Screen size: 10.3-inch | Battery life: Two weeks | Network connectivity: Wi-Fi | Capacity: 8GB | Included stylus: No, extra cost | Supported file types: PDF, EPUB
The latest reMarkable tablet isn’t topping our list because it’s the most full-featured or even most interesting writing tablet we tested. Rather, it provides the best mix of features people will find useful in an e-paper device like this.
We’ll get into them all, but first, it’s worth mentioning build quality. The reMarkable 2 weighs less than one pound and is one of the sleekest E Ink tablets we tried. It has a 10.3-inch monochrome digital paper display that’s surrounded by beige-colored bezels, with the chunkiest portion at the bottom edge where you’d naturally grip it. There’s a slim silver bezel on the left side, which attaches to accessories like the folio case and the new Type Folio keyboard. Hats off to reMarkable for making an E Ink tablet that feels right at home with all of your other fancy gadgets.
Let’s start with the writing and reading experiences on the reMarkable 2, both of which are great. From the get go, scribbling, doodling and writing was a breeze. I tested out the Marker Plus, which has a built-in eraser, but both it and the standard Marker are tilt- and pressure sensitive pens, and require no batteries or charging. I observed basically no lag between my pressing down onto the reMarkable 2’s screen and lines showing up. The latency was so low that it felt the closest to actual pen-and-paper. But I will say that this is not unique among our top picks in this guide – almost all of the E Ink tablets I tested got this very crucial feature right.
When it comes to reading, the reMarkable 2 supports PDFs and ePUBs, and you can add files to the device by logging into your reMarkable account on desktop or via the companion mobile app on your phone. You can also pair your Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive or Dropbox account with your reMarkable account and access files that way as well. That should be good enough for anyone who, say, reads a lot of academic papers or reviews many documents for work. It’ll be harder for people who purchase their ebooks from online marketplaces like the Kindle or Kobo stores, but there are other options for those.
Another fun way to get documents onto the reMarkable 2 is via the Read with reMarkable extension for Google Chrome. After installing it and pairing your reMarkable account, you’ll be able to send articles you find online directly to your reMarkable 2 so you can check them out later. You can even customize these files to be sent as text only, which will let you change their format directly on your reMarkable, or as a PDF file. Regardless of which you choose, you’ll be able to mark up these articles as you would any other file on the E Ink tablet.
I used this extension a lot and I enjoyed reading longform articles on the reMarkable 2 more than on my iPhone. Being able to underline, highlight and otherwise mark up those stories was more of a bonus than a necessity for me, but for others who glean sources from online materials will be better off for it.
Overall, it’s pretty easy to get files onto the reMarkable 2 and it is possible to access them elsewhere when you may not be able to whip out the E Ink tablet. Those with a reMarkable Connect subscription will have the best experience, and it’s a nice perk that you get a one-year membership when you buy one. The $3-per-month (or $30-per-year) subscription provides the ability to edit existing notes and take new ones from anywhere using the desktop and mobile apps, plus unlimited cloud storage and syncing.
That said, I kept most of my testing local on the reMarkable 2 itself and was impressed by its ability to be a digital notebook without a steep learning curve. You can create different notebooks and “quick sheets” to organize your handwritten notes, and folders to make sense of imported files. You’ll find eight different brush types with which to mark up documents and take notes, along with customizable line thicknesses and “colors” (which just show up as shades on the tablet itself). You can even type wherever you want in a doc, and the reMarkable 2 can translate handwritten notes into machine-readable text with surprising accuracy.
It was no shock that the reMarkable 2 ended up having the best mix of features, along with a relatively low learning curve. The company was one of the first on the scene with a truly viable E Ink tablet back in 2017, and they’ve been refining the experience ever since. But that comes at a cost – the reMarkable 2 isn’t the most expensive E Ink tablet we tested, but it’s not cheap either. The tablet will set you back $399 with the standard Marker, or $449 for a bundle with the Marker Plus. You could get a 10th-gen iPad and the USB-C Apple Pencil for around the same price and you’d have a more flexible duo, purely based on the capabilities of iOS.
But you’re probably not considering an iPad for a specific reason, whether that’s your love for E Ink or the feeling of pen-to-paper writing, or you simply want a more distraction-free experience. If you’re looking for an E Ink tablet that will not take ages to get used to, offers a stellar writing experience and makes it relatively simple to access notes elsewhere, the reMarkable 2 is your best bet.
Pros
Great reading and writing experience
Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox support
Easy to use
Cons
Marker costs extra
Expensive
Unlimited cloud storage comes with a subscription cost
Screen size: 11.8-inch | Battery life: Two weeks | Network connectivity: Wi-Fi | Capacity: 64GB | Included stylus: No, extra cost | Supported file types: PDF, EPUB
ReMarkable upped the ante in basically every way with the Paper Pro, without sacrificing anything we loved about the reMarkable 2. Both my colleague Dan Cooper and I tested out the new device and you can read his full reMarkable Paper Pro review here, which goes in-depth into the Paper Pro’s achievements and shortcomings. In my testing, I was most impressed by the refined design, faster response times and small joys that came from having a new color display.
The $629 Paper Pro has an 11.8-inch display, which is slightly larger and taller than that of the reMarkable 2. It’s not cumbersome, though, and with its 5.1mm thickness, it gets really close to the legal-pad notebook size I personally love. It feels quite premium on its own, especially with the new grooved edges, and even with its Folio protector, it stays quite svelte. The reMarkable 2 certainly isn’t an ogre by comparison, but the “pro” in the Paper Pro’s name is well-deserved.
Inside the reMarkable Paper Pro is a 1.8GHz quad-core Cortex A53 processor, 2GB of RAM and 64GB of storage — all of which are specs that have been bumped up from the reMarkable 2. It truly makes a difference in the performance of the new model. The Pro feels zippier than the reMarkable 2: page refreshes are quicker, actions and transitions are more smooth and pen latency is only 12ms (almost undetectable in my experience).
Where you see the gears working most often is in the use of color. The Paper Pro’s screen uses a modified version of E Ink’s Gallery 3 technology called Canvas Color, which is capable of producing 20,000 colors that can layer on top of each other (think when you highlight a line more than once using two different colors over one another). You can actually see the pixels turning from a standard black color to the color of your choosing when you’re scribbling in a note, which isn’t a bad thing because the screen doesn’t lag or freeze because of this — write at your own speed and the device will up and produce the right colors as you go along.
As for software, you’re getting the same experience as you would with the reMarkable 2, which is to stay a pretty streamlined interface that makes it easy to organize all of your documents, notes and other reading and writing material. The reMarkable 2 offered one of the most approachable software experiences in an E Ink tablet, and that continues here on the Paper Pro. These devices prioritize a distraction-free environment — or at the very least, a lower-distraction zone — and I appreciate how reMarkable has kept its devices’ interface simple and straightforward.
Arguably the biggest caveat to any reMarkable tablet remains the monthly Connection subscription — an optional $3 monthly or $30 annually service that provides unlimited cloud storage, device syncing and the ability to create and edit notes in reMarkable mobile apps. Power users will likely find it worthwhile to pay for Connect, but the Paper Pro’s 64GB of internal storage might be enough for others who want to keep it simple (and keep all of their activity to the Paper Pro itself). New device owners get a 100-day free trial, so it’s easy enough to give Connect a shot and then cancel if you don’t find yourself using all of its perks.
The most important thing to remember if you’re considering a reMarkable tablet is that, based on our testing, both the reMarkable 2 and reMarkable Paper Pro are solid devices. The Paper Pro certainly earned its “pro” moniker thanks to noticeable improvements the company made, but those do not negate how good of a device the reMarkable 2 still is. But if you’ve got the cash and want to invest in a luxury E Ink tablet experience, the Paper Pro is the way to go.
Screen size: 10.2-inch | Battery life: Months | Network connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth | Capacity: Up to 64GB | Included stylus: Yes | Supported file types: AZW3, AZW, TXT, PDF, unprotected MOBI, PRC natively and more
You really have two options in this space: the Amazon Kindle Scribe and the Kobo Elipsa 2E. The Scribe edged out the Elipsa 2E purely because of its low-latency pen-and-screen combination. The Elipsa has its merits, which we’ll get into in a bit, but it just couldn’t compete with the Scribe when it came to a seamless and smooth handwriting experience.
We already gave the Kindle Scribe the full review treatment and tested out the latest Kindle Scribe, which incorporates more AI features. As mentioned, there’s little to no latency when writing on the Scribe with its companion pen. Thanks to the latest software update, you also have more brush types to choose from now, including fountain pen, marker and pencil, which add to the charm. Like other E Ink tablets, the Scribe makes it easy to create multiple notebooks, and you can add pages to them and change up their templates if you wish.
As an e-reader, the Scribe shines not only thanks to its 10.2-inch touchscreen with auto-adjusting front lights, but also because you have Amazon’s entire ebook store at your fingertips. If you get most of your reading material from Amazon or subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, you’ll be able to jump right into all of your titles instantly on the Scribe just as you would on a device like the Kindle Paperwhite. In addition, the Scribe can connect to Audible via Bluetooth for audiobook listening. It’s also easy to get ebooks from your local library and read them on a Kindle. This will be crucial not only for voracious readers, but especially for students who buy or rent digital textbooks and those who consume books regularly for research purposes.
I thought about students a lot when using the Scribe. I started college in 2009, two years after the first Kindle was released and one year before the first iPad came out. Getting textbooks digitally really wasn’t an option for me – but I can understand the appeal a note-taking device like the Kindle Scribe would have for students. It’s arguably even better than a standard Kindle because of its bigger screen size, which will make it less tiring to stare at for long periods of time. Adding the ability to take handwritten notes while you’re studying is icing on the cake.
However, Amazon’s execution of book notes is not my favorite. You cannot make annotations in the margins of Kindle ebooks. Instead you press and hold the pen’s tip on the screen to highlight text or add a note to a particular word or phrase. If you do the latter, a window pops up on the bottom half of the screen where you can either take a handwritten note or type a text note using the Scribe’s mildly frustrating and sluggish on-screen keyboard.
Amazon rectified this a bit with a software update that allows for direct on-page writing in certain Kindle books. The Kindle Store now has a section that showcases “Write-on Books,” which is currently mostly made up of journals and game books that feature puzzles like crosswords and sudoku. This is certainly a step in the right direction, but it means you still won’t be able to mark up your favorite fiction and non-fiction books until they support the new feature.
This is where I give a nod to the Kobo Elipsa 2E, where you can write notes in the margins, underline, circle and otherwise mark up your reading material. It’s a more natural (and fun) experience since it mimics what you’d do if you were reading a physical book. It’s a shame that the latency on the Elipsa was just a hair more noticeable than that of the Scribe. If it weren’t for that, it might have beaten Amazon’s device here.
What that extra bit of latency translates to in practice is handwriting that can come out just a bit messier, and that increases precipitously the faster you write. But that also means that you’ll notice this the most when taking notes longhand on the Elipsa; if you’re primarily using an E Ink tablet to mark up documents, it won’t affect you as much.
Despite that, I did like the way Kobo executed notebooks on the Elipsa. You can have a standard notebook where you can write and scribble away, or an “advanced” notebook that supports handwriting-to-text conversion and inserting things like diagrams and formulas. Text conversion is actually pretty accurate, too, even when dealing with some of my ugliest handwriting. Kobo also has a pretty sizable ebook marketplace, so it’s certainly a decent option if you want to stay clear of the Amazon ecosystem.
Screen size: 7.8-inch | Battery life: Weeks | Network connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth | Capacity: 32GB, expandable up to 2TB with microSD card | Included stylus: No, extra cost | Supported file types: PDF, EPUB, Word, Text (.txt), PNG, JPG, Comic book archive (.cbz), FictionBook2 (.fb2) and OpenXPS (.xps)
Supernote impressed me with its X tablet when I first tested it and now the company is on the X2 version. The A6 X2 model has a 7.8-inch screen, and the recently released Manta A5 X2 has a 10.7-inch display. I’ve tried both out at this point and the main difference, as one might expect, is screen size.
But before we get into a comparison of the two Supernote devices, let’s talk about the upgrades the company made to both recently. With the Nomad X2, the design has been tweaked in subtle ways from the original Supernote I tested. You get the updated FeelWrite 2 screen protector experience, which is a smoother, less scratchy one than other E Ink tablets, and a plastic body that’s pretty lightweight. There are dual sidebars, sections on both long edges of the tablet that, when swiped, bring up a menu, making this version easier for right- and left-handed users alike. The software auto-rotates when you flip the screen, too. On top of that, both the Nomad and Manta X2 devices are user-repairable now with replaceable batteries and a microSD card slot, both of which you can see on the backside of the tablet thanks to its clear panel (there’s an opaque, white option too that’s also just as upgradeable but nowhere near as futuristic looking).
Unsurprisingly, this is still the most fun I had using any E Ink tablet. Thanks to its support of a range of file formats (PDF, ePUB, Word, PNG, JPG, etc), you can put plenty of material onto the X2 and do what you like with it. In my previous experiments, I wanted to see if I could treat it almost like a digital bullet journal, and that wasn’t hard to do. There are built-in page templates, but I was able to download daily, weekly and monthly planner templates online, resize them and move them onto the X2 using Android File Transfer. The device has a dedicated “MyStyle” folder where you can save files you want to use as templates. The most difficult part was making sure I had the dimensions right while resizing the documents. Once saved in the right folder, I could make an entire notebook out of the templates I had gotten from the internet for free.
But you don’t have to get that deep if you don’t want to; Supernote’s software comes with a number of built-in note templates that are more than suitable for a range of situations and scenarios. The device still has its own app store, but it’s pretty sparse, save for the Kindle app (although, the last thing I wanted to do on the Supernote was read) and the new Atelier painting app. The latter is described by the company as “professional painting software” that has a number of different brush options, marker and spray tools, 16 levels of grayscale color and the option to export your creations as PSD files so you can take them to the next level in Photoshop. It’s a fun take on a more artistic notebook of sorts, and those who find themselves wanting to separate their artistic creations from their mostly-words notes will appreciate the inclusion.
This device really shines as an E Ink notebook and the company clearly put a lot of thought into “building a better mousetrap,” so to speak. You can translate handwritten words into typed text, but you don’t have to do that in order for the software to recognize your handwriting. There’s a keywords feature that lets you basically bookmark important phrases for quick access later. All you need to do is lasso the word, press the keyword button and the tablet’s software will translate your writing into typed text. Then you can add it as a keyword and quickly jump back to it from the left-side tablet of contents menu. Similarly, you can bookmark titles and add stars to pages that are important, all of which help you jump between important bits.
That said, a Supernote device is similar to one from Onyx Boox in that it’s not going to hold your hand. You have to be ready to play around, mess with settings and generally tinker with it right when you open the box, and some will be just fine doing that (like our own weekend editor Cheyenne MacDonald). The software isn’t as polished as that on devices made by Amazon or Kobo, which leads to an unavoidable learning curve. But notebook nerds like myself will be thrilled with all that the Supernote Nomad has to offer.
That said, this isn’t the most expensive E Ink tablet on our list, but it will set you back $329 or more: $329 for the Nomad A6 X2 or $505 for the Manta X2, and $89 (or more) for an accompanying pen. Which size you choose will ultimately depend on personal preference. The Nomad, as its name suggests, is the more portable of the two and feels more like interacting with a paperback book (albeit a very thin one), whereas the Manta gives you noticeably more screen real estate. If you know you’ll do a lot of writing on this device, consider your handwriting sizer — those who default to cursive or big, loopy print may find a more spacious companion in the Manta.
Onxy continues to iterate on its lineup of E Ink tablets with the Note Air4 C, a tablet that looks and feels almost identical to the Air3 C, but now it’s slightly less weighty (literally 10g lighter than its predecessor), includes two extra gigabytes of RAM and runs Android 13.
I experienced little to no latency when writing on the Boox Note Air and I was happy with the number of brush options it has in the Notebook app. Thanks to the color E Ink display, now you can even add and save a few different brushes with colored ink, line thickness and other specifics and quickly switch between them. This is particularly useful on a color E Ink tablet like this because you can save, say, black, red and blue brushes to use to differentiate different types of notes and switching among them is super quick. You can also now add different shapes to notes and fill them in with color; I made something that resembled a sticky note using a simple square filled in with yellow. The most visual learners among us will find features like this very helpful.
Like the Supernote A6 X2, this tablet comes with a bunch of page templates you can use for note-taking (including some color options now as well), or you can bring in your own PDFs and other documents to use as templates. There’s an “AI recognition” feature that translates a whole page’s handwriting into typed text, and it’s actually pretty accurate. (Though, it did consistently confuse my “&” for a capital A). I also appreciated that you can add other kinds of material to your notes, including web pages and voice recordings, and share notes as PDFs or PNGs via email, Google Drive and other services. Features like those ensure that, with this partially analog device, you don’t miss out on some of the conveniences that a true digital notebook system would have.
The fact remains that Boox’s entire Note series is what you’d get if you removed some of the notebook-specific features from the Supernote A6 X2 and added in a more complete version of Android. Boox makes a number of interesting E Ink devices and the Boox Note Air is the one that best compares to the others on our list thanks to its 10.3-inch display. They are E Ink Android tablets, so that means you can actually download Android apps from the Google Play Store like Kindle, Kobo and others. There’s even a web browser, and yes, you can watch videos on this thing, too.
Of course, just because you can do all of that doesn’t mean you should. E Ink screens are truly best for reading and writing, so I didn’t spend much time binge watching YouTube on Boox’s device – but I was happy that I had the freedom to do so. Really, the utility of Android comes in with the app store and I expect that most people will use it to download all of their favorite reading and writing apps. Much like a standard tablet, this will be a great option for anyone that gets their reading material from a bunch of different places — and since you can manually transfer documents from your computer to the device, too, it’s far-and-away the most versatile option on our list.
And, importantly, Boox tablets in general offer an interesting value proposition. A Boox Note Air4 C bundle with the tablet, a standard pen and a folio case comes in at $529, putting it on the higher end of the price spectrum among the devices we tested. But considering it’s a full Android tablet, that doesn’t seem absurd. Those who want to avoid distractions most of the time while still having access to email and a web browser might gravitate towards a device like this.
Pros
Color E Ink display
Runs Android 13 with access to Google Play Store
Supports many ways to add files to the device
Stylus included in the box
Cons
E Ink screen hinders it from being a good video-consumption device
Most E Ink tablets available now max out at 10 or 11 inches in screen size. But the latest model from Boox, the Note Max, has a gloriously large 13.3-inch Carta 1300 display. It’s not the only E Ink tablet from Boox to get this big — the Tab X has the same size screen, albeit with a lower dpi (207 vs the Note Max’s 300) — but it is one of the few e-paper tablets with such a large display made by an established manufacturer in this space.
Aside from the luxurious display, the Note Max feels and works like any other tablet in the Note series so get ready to tinker with it if this is your first such Android-based device. But I found the note-taking and doodling experience to be remarkable on such a large e-paper display. I’m someone who prefers large notebooks (B5-sized and larger, A4 or legal-pad sized preferred) so it’s not surprising that I was drawn to the Note Max.
One of the native Boox apps I particularly loved using in this large-format device was Calendar Memo, which gives you a month-view calendar that you can tap into individual days and take notes that correspond to that day. So for example, you can take work notes, journal, write down to-do lists and more and return to those writings even after the day has passed just by tapping on a specific day in the calendar. And if you use Boox’s native ereading app, the books and documents you read on each day will also show up with your notes, providing a handy log of your progress. Not only did I find it useful to have all of that information in one viewport thanks to the huge display, but I could also see myself using the Calendar Memo app regularly to log all of the most important things I want to remember long-term for each day.
That said, the Note Max doesn’t come cheap: it’s $689 for the tablet, plus the included cover and stylus. While it’s great that Boox doesn’t make you pay extra for those much-needed accessories, it’s still likely too cost-prohibitive for most people.
Pros
Sharp E Ink Carta 1300 display
Luxe 13.3-inch screen size
Runs Android 13 with access to the Google Play Store
If you like the idea of the reMarkable Paper Pro but either want something smaller or cheaper (or both), the new Paper Pro Move was basically made for you. With its 7.3-inch Canvas Color display, it resembles a steno-pad version of the full-sized Paper Pro. It’s most similar in size to the Supernote Nomad, but the Paper Pro Move is slightly smaller in width and height, which should allow it to slip into wide pockets more easily.
The hardware is top-notch just like the regular Paper Pro, with solid, ridged edges and a luxe screen that provides good feedback when you write on it. Its marker attaches magnetically to the right side of the device for charging and safe keeping, and you can optionally get a folio case for the Paper Pro Move that will protect the screen when you’re not using it and secure the marker even further.
Software is identical here to the regular Paper Pro as well, with a few new added features like a drag-and-drop toolbar, note search and handwriting-to-text conversion that will be available across other reMarkable tablets. In addition, you can create all manner of notebooks for handwritten text and upload documents using reMarkable’s mobile app and web client. The device supports PDFs and EPUB files, which limits things a bit if you were hoping to use this like a ereader. There are better E Ink tablets for that purpose; the Paper Pro Move, just like the regular tablet, is best for handwriting notes, marking up documents and the like. And thanks to its size, it’ll likely be much better for those who work on location or in the field, rather than at a desk.
The price is also a bit more manageable than the full-sized Paper Pro. The Move will run you $449 when paired with its standard marker, but if you want the upgraded marker and want to add the folio case into the mix, be prepared to spend more. Still, $449 is a better starting price than the regular Paper Pro’s $629 floor.
Pros
Compact size
Excellent build quality
Good battery life
Cons
On the expensive side for a small tablet
No keyboard folio option; limited to on-screen keyboard
Screen size: 7-inch | Battery life: Up to 40 days | Network connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth | Capacity: 32GB | Included stylus: No | Supported file types: EPUB, EPUB3, FlePub, PDF, MOBI, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, TXT, HTML, RTF, CBZ, CBR, Kobo audiobooks
The Kobo Libra Colour not only adds color to its screen but also stylus support. That means you can highlight text, write in the margins of e-books and create notebooks. The low-latency, feature-rich stylus, plus integration with Dropbox and Google Drive, make the Libra Colour a surprisingly effective E Ink tablet. Ultimately, we still think the Kindle Scribe is your best bet for a tablet-and-ereader combo, thanks to the more expansive Kindle library and the larger, ten-inch screen — but Kobo’s latest deserves a mention.
The Libra Colour is our current pick for a model with buttons in our ereader guide. It has a premium build, plenty of text customizations for comfortable reading and a crisp, warm-light, seven-inch display. The addition of color adds interest to book covers and lets you highlight text in four different hues. Kobo also stuck a faster processor in the device, which makes waking from sleep, turning pages, navigating the menu and changing orientation zippy fast.
The Libra Colour doesn’t come with the Kobo stylus — another point in the Scribe’s favor — but if you add the $70 accessory, you’ll be able to highlight text and scribble notes in the margins of any book. You’ll also unlock access to Kobo’s two styles of notebooks: Basic, which lets you draw, scribble and write freehand, and Advanced, which can convert handwriting to typed text and lets you add diagrams and sections.
The stylus offers three pen styles, plus a brush and highlighter, and switching between them is quick with an unobtrusive menu. Thanks to the color technology, you can write and draw in ten colors and highlight in four. One of the few issues I ran into was with the highlighter button — it’s in a great spot for spotlighting text on the fly, but that location is also right where I rest my pointer finger, so I often hit it while writing. But the utility of the built-in eraser balances out that irritation.
I noticed a barely perceptible latency and good pressure sensitivity, which is most obvious using the fountain pen. The tap-to-convert feature almost always correctly turned my weird printing-and-cursive-hybrid handwriting into type, and uploading notebooks to Dropbox or Google Drive took mere seconds. (You can also do hardwired, USB-C transfers to a computer.)
With the added cost of the stylus, you’ll pay $300 for Kobo’s set, which is still $100 cheaper than the base model of the latest Kindle Scribe. If you don’t need a larger screen or access to the hundreds of Kindle titles you may have already purchased, the Libra Colour makes for an appealing ereader/E Ink tablet alternative. — Amy Skorheim, Senior Reporter
An E Ink tablet will be a worthwhile purchase to a very select group of people. If you prefer the look and feel of an e paper display to LCD panels found on traditional tablets, it makes a lot of sense. They’re also good options for those who want a more paper-like writing experience (although you can get that kind of functionality on a regular tablet with the right screen protector) or a more distraction-free device overall.
The final note is key here. Many E Ink tablets don’t run on the same operating systems as regular tablets, so you’re automatically going to be limited in what you can do. And even with those that do allow you to download traditional apps like Chrome, Instagram and Facebook, E Ink tablets are not designed to give you the best casual-browsing experience. This is mostly due to the nature of E Ink displays, which have noticeable refreshes, a lack of vibrant colors and lower picture quality than the panels you’ll find on even the cheapest iPad.
Arguably the biggest reason why you wouldn’t want to go with an iPad (all models of which support stylus input, a plethora of reading apps, etc) is because it’s much easier to get distracted by email, social media and other Internet-related temptations.
What to look for in an E Ink tablet
Writing and latency
Arguably the most important thing to consider when looking for an E Ink tablet is the writing experience. How good it is will depend a lot on the display’s refresh rate (does it refresh after every time you put pen to “paper,” or at a different regular interval) and the stylus’ latency. Most of the tablets I’ve tested have little to no latency, but some are certainly better than others. Finally, you should double check before buying that your preferred E Ink tablet comes with a stylus, or if you need to purchase one separately.
Reading
How much will you be reading books, documents and other things on this tablet? E Ink tablets come in many sizes, but most of them tend to be larger than your standard e-reader because it makes writing much easier. Having a larger display isn’t a bad thing, but it might make holding it for long periods slightly more uncomfortable. (Most e-readers are roughly the size of a paperback book, giving you a similar feeling to analog reading).
The supported file types for e-books can also make a big difference. It’s hard to make a blanket statement here because this varies so much among E Ink tablets. The TL;DR is that you’ll have a much better reading experience if you go with one made by a company that already has a history in e-book sales (i.e. Amazon or Kobo). All of the titles you bought via the Kindle or Kobo store should automatically be available to you on your Kindle or Kobo E Ink tablet.
Also with Kindle titles, specifically, since they are protected by DRM, it’s not necessarily the best idea to try to bring those titles over to a third-party device. Unless the tablet runs an operating system like Android that supports downloads for apps like Kindle and Kobo, you’ll be limited to supported file types, like ePUB, PDF, MOBI, JPEG, PNG and others.
Search functionality
Most E Ink tablets have some on-device search features, but they can vary widely between models. You’ll want to consider how important it is to you to be able to search through all your handwritten notes and markups. I noticed in my testing that Amazon’s and Kobo’s E Ink tablets made it easy to refer back to notes made in books and files because they automatically save to the specific pages on which you took notes, made highlights and more.
Searching is less standardized on E Ink tablets that have different supported file types, but their features can be quite powerful in their own right. For example, a few devices I tested supported text search in handwritten notes along with handwriting recognition, the latter of which allows you to translate your scribbles into typed text.
Sharing and connectivity
While we established that E Ink tablets can be great distraction-free devices, most manufacturers understand that your notes and doodles aren’t created in a vacuum. You may want to access them elsewhere, and that requires some form of connectivity. All of the E Ink tablets I tried have Wi-Fi support, and some support cloud syncing, companion mobile apps and the ability to export notes via email so you can access them elsewhere.
None of them, however, integrate directly with a digital note taking system like Evernote or OneNote, so these devices will always be somewhat supplementary if you use apps like that, too. I’d argue that, if you already lean heavily on apps like OneNote, a standard tablet with a stylus and screen protector might be the best way to go. Ultimately, you should think about what you will want to do with the documents you’ll interact with on your E Ink tablet after the tablet portion is done.
Price
E Ink tablets aren’t known for being cheap. They generally fall into the $300-$800 price range, which is what you can expect to pay for a solid regular tablet, too. A key factor in price is size: cheaper devices with E Ink displays are likely to have smaller screens, and stylus support isn’t as much of a given. Also, those types of devices are generally considered e-readers because of their size and may not be the best for note-taking, doodling and the like.
E Ink tablets have gone up in price recently. Supernote and Onyx Boox increased prices, as did reMarkable. The former said it was due to “increased costs,” and a reMarkable representative confirmed this to Engadget and provided the following statement: “We regularly review our pricing based on market conditions and operational costs. We’ve communicated an upcoming adjustment for the US market effective in May to provide transparency to our customers. Multiple factors influence our pricing decisions, including supply chain dynamics and overall operational costs in specific markets.”
As a result, the reMarkable Paper Pro jumped from $579 to $629 (that’s for the bundle with the standard Marker and no Folio). This isn’t great, considering the Paper Pro was already on the expensive side of the spectrum for E Ink tablets. It’s also worth noting that Supernote and Onyx Boox have raised prices in the past few months as well.
Other E Ink tablets we’ve tested
Onyx Boox Tab X C
The Boox Tab X C is a color-screened version of the Tab X, the company’s all-purpose e-paper Android tablet. The Tab X C has a lovely 13.3-inch Kaleido 3 E Ink color display, an octa-core processor, 6GB of RAM and it runs on Android 13, making it one of the most powerful tablets in Boox’s lineup. I’ve used the Tab X in the past and this color version runs similarly, if not better, and at 5.3mm thick, it’s impressively svelte even when you pair it with its folio keyboard case. As someone who loves legal-pad sized things to write on, I also like how the Tab X C is most akin to A4-size paper. But at $820 for the bundle with the standard case (or a whopping $970 for the tablet and its keyboard case), it’s really only best for those who are ready to go all-in on a premium E Ink tablet.
Lenovo Smart Paper
Lenovo made a solid E Ink tablet in the Smart Paper, but it’s too pricey and too married to the company’s companion cloud service to warrant a spot on our top picks list. The hardware is great, but the software isn’t as flexible as those of competitors like the reMarkable 2. It has good Google Drive integration, but you must pair it with Lenovo’s cloud service to really get the most use out of it — and in the UK, the service costs £9 per month for three months, which is quite expensive.
Onyx Boox Tab Ultra
The Boox Tab Ultra has a lot of the same features we like in the Note Air 2 Plus, but it’s designed to be a true, all-purpose tablet with an E Ink screen. Running Android 11 and compatible with a magnetic keyboard case, you can use it like a standard 2-in-1 laptop, albeit a low-powered one. You can browse the web, check email and even watch YouTube videos on this thing — but that doesn’t mean you should. A standard 2-in-1 laptop with a more responsive screen and better overall performance would be a better fit for most people who even have the slightest desire to have an all-in-one device. Like the rest of Onyx’s devices, the Tab Ultra is specifically for those who put reading and eye comfort above all else.
After testing around a dozen ereaders, we think the best bet for most people is the Kobo Clara Colour. But the base-model Kindle is also good, offering a cheap and easy entry point into ebooks. And Boox makes a few E Ink readers that do more than just display books. Now that most ereader companies also offer color models, the field is wider than ever. In short, there are a few things to consider before buying your next (or first) ereader and this guide covers product recommendations alongside advice on how to get the most out of your new device.
Table of contents
The best ebook readers for 2025
Photo by Amy Skorheim / Engadget
Screen size: 6” | Display type: Black/white and color E Ink | Resolution: 300 dpi black & white, 150 dpi color | Capacity: 16GB| Battery life: Up to 42 days (30 min. daily, 30% brightness, Wi-Fi/BT off) | Waterproof rating: IPX8 (submergible to 6 feet for 60 minutes) | Warm light: Yes | Lock screen ads: No | Text formats: EPUB, EPUB3, FlePub, PDF, MOBI, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, TXT, HTML, RTF, CBZ, CBR
Our previous pick for this category, the Kobo Clara 2E was an excellent ereader with a crisp display, a warm glow and responsive, intuitive touch controls all housed in a waterproof design that felt premium. When Rakuten announced the Clara would be updated, I worried we’d see Kobo device with superfluous revamping to justify an inflated price. Thankfully, that’s not the case. The Kobo Clara Colour not only adds color and a faster processor, it’s just $10 more than the previous generation.
As the name suggests, this ereader adds color to the page, lending a little vibrance to book covers, tables and graphs, and even the panels of graphic novels. The technology comes from E Ink, in the form of the Kaleido 3 module that incorporates a color filter layer on top of the standard black and white microcapsule layer. That results in two different resolutions on one screen: 150 dpi for color and 300 dpi for text.
Full-color pages remind me of comic book art from the ‘60s, muted but saturated. Color makes book covers more enticing and adds a little variety to headings, and tables in some non-fiction books. It’s certainly not a necessary feature, but it adds vibrance and it’s fun.
There is a slight difference in clarity between the color and non-color version of the Clara. If you look closely, you can see a bit of noise on the white parts of the page. That’s due to the added color filter layer. It’s not distracting and only something I noticed when comparing the two generations side-by-side. but if absolute clarity is your primary goal, you may be better off with a non-color ereader.
Probably the more useful upgrade here is the dual 2GHz processor, a bump from the Clara 2E’s 1GHz CPU. There’s a noticeable improvement in the speed of the page turns and navigating from the menu to the page and back again is nearly instantaneous. As with the 2E, the Colour rarely mistakes a swipe for a tap or a page turn gesture for a menu request.
The adjustable warm front light is still here (it’s actually a little warmer on the Colour) and makes reading at night easy on the eyes. The operating system is the same, with intuitive access to the Kobo store, your personal books and titles from your local library via Overdrive. You can customize your reading experience with options for font, font size, line spacing, margins and so on. Kobos don’t have a way to save a group of display settings like the Kindle does, so I’d love to see that added with future OS upgrades. But for now, the customizations are just enough to get your book how you want it to look.
The Colour is nearly identical in shape and size, and has the same premium feel as the 2E, though the plastic has a grainier finish. The bezels are noticeably less flush with the screen now, though that didn’t alter my reading enjoyment.
Now that it costs $150, the Kobo Clara Colour is $40 more than the base model Kindle. But the waterproof build, warm front light, responsive controls and lack of ads (which cost $20 to get rid of on Amazon’s device) make it worth it. And, in great news for the right to repair crowd, it’s even designed to be user-repaired once it falls outside of warranty through a partnership with iFixit.
Rakuten still makes the Kobo Clara BW, which is nearly identical to our previous “best overall” pick. It doesn’t suffer from the slight clarity loss that the color overlay presents, but it also still has the older processor.
Of course, if you already own a mountain of Kindle books, you may want to stick with Amazon’s system. In that case, the best Kindle is Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite. It costs $160 and was recently updated with a more powerful processor and new E Ink tech that makes it exceptionally speedy while displaying high-contrast text. The warm light is great and the flush front screen feels premium.
One more consideration, now that Amazon now has its own color model too, is the . The original costs $280, which is significantly more expensive than the Clara Colour and even the . In July, Amazon released a color model for $230. It has less storage, no wireless charging and no auto-adjusting front-lights, but costs $30 less than the original.
If you just want to read books, and have no need for the perks that the fancier ereaders bring (color, waterproof rating, warm light, etc), then the base model Kindle is for you. The six-inch, non-flush display is housed in a textured plastic that feels less premium than, say, the Paperwhite or even the two Kobos on our list, but still feels plenty durable. And it’s small enough to fit in a coat or back pocket making it very travel-friendly.
It’s unfortunate that the 2024 model is $10 more than the 2022 model when not much has changed, but it’s still the cheapest ereader from any of the major manufacturers. And if we know one thing about Amazon, it’s that the company loves a good sale, so you’ll likely find it on discount if you can hold out for Prime Day or Black Friday deals.
The reader is a no-frills gateway to the best of what the Kindle ecosystem has to offer, including Kindle Exclusive titles, with books by established authors as well as newer, self-published writers; Kindle Unlimited offers the widest selection of any subscription-based reading service out there; and Audible Originals is made up of narrated titles and podcasts you can only hear through a Kindle device or Amazon-owned app.
If you like to switch between audiobooks and ebooks, Kindle is the way to go. When you buy both iterations of a title, you not only get a discount, but the Whispersync feature lines up where you are in the e-printed version with the narration, too. Say you listen for an hour and then want to read – the synchronization lets you pick up on-screen where you left off audibly. (Though we should point out that you can’t listen and read simultaneously on the same device.) In tests, the feature was fairly accurate, getting me close enough on the page or in the audio to figure out my spot.
Page turns are quicker on the new model but I’m disappointed that there’s still no way to adjust the zones and responses to touchscreen gestures, like there is on both Kobo and Boox devices. Kindles all have a very narrow strip on the left for going back a page and I’m constantly missing it and going forward instead. Though swipes generally work well.
Probably the most noticeable missing feature is the 6-inch screen’s lack of warm light. Compared to any ereader with that option, the screen on the standard Kindle appears harsh and bluish, but it’s still far easier on your eyes than a phone or tablet screen. There’s plenty of customization for the font, size and margins, too. You can even save your settings as a “theme,” something not offered by other devices. I created one with larger text and wider line spacing called “tired eyes.”
Some people won’t be bothered by the lock screen ads that come standard on this Kindle (unless you pay $20 to remove them). They’re fairly innocuous, mostly promoting Kindle book deals or specific titles (it’s not like you’ll see promos for TVs or robotic pool cleaners). Personally, I like being able to set the sleep screen to the book cover of what I’m currently reading, but it’s easy to get over that if all you want is a more convenient way to consume books at the lowest price.
Pros
The most affordable ereader
Compact and durable build is highly portable
Grants access to Kindle’s vast ebook catalog plus library books
Screen size: 7” | Display type: Black/white and color E Ink | Resolution: 300 dpi black & white, 150 dpi color | Capacity: 32GB | Battery life: Weeks | Waterproof rating: IPX8 (submergible to 6 feet for 60 minutes) | Warm light: Yes | Lock screen ads: No | Text formats: EPUB, EPUB3, FlePub, PDF, MOBI, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, TXT, HTML, RTF, CBZ, CBR
When Kobo came out with the new Clara Colour, it also debuted the new Libra Colour, which might be the more exciting of the two devices. In addition to color technology from the E Ink Kaleido panel and an upgraded processor, the Libra now has stylus support. It’s the only ereader on this list with that feature, making it a lot like a small E Ink tablet — but all of its new features actually make it a better ereader.
When I wrote about the previous generation ereader, the Libra 2, I was impressed by how comfortable it was for reading. None of that has changed; the buttons and auto-rotating screen adapt the device to just about any reading position you chose and the thin design, textured back and soft-touch plastic give it a premium feel.
Kobo’s interface is nearly the same here as with other models, nicely organized to let you easily find your current reads or browse and search new titles from Kobo’s store or your local library in the Overdrive tab. The customizations for light and text let you get the page looking just how you like it, but there aren’t so many options that it feels like you’re writing code.
The new features add to the experience. In color, book covers all look more enticing — though, if your TBR list is already three feet long, this won’t not help things. The new processor makes waking from sleep, turning pages, navigating the menu and changing orientation zippy fast.
Then there’s the status compatibility. Try as they might, some new technologies don’t yet beat their real-world counterparts. That’s mostly how I feel about styluses — I’m just a big fan of pen on paper. But Kobo’s stylus makes it so fun to highlight text and scribble notes in the margins of a book that I’m starting to come around. Plus, it neatly and magnetically attaches to the side so it doesn’t get lost.
Pressing and holding the button on the side of the stylus highlights text while flipping it around erases. I accidentally pressed the button a few times when I was trying to write, but I got used to the placement after a few minutes of using it. You can pick from four different highlighter colors and view your written notes and spotlighted text in the notes section of any title — which I could see being pretty useful for book club reads, school assignments or just refreshing yourself on a past read before you dive into the sequel.
Note-taking in the margins or directly on the text worked on every book I tried. Though I should point out that if you change the font size in a book, your handwritten notes will be converted to a sticky note-type box. Going back to the original font restores your original annotations.
The Kobo Libra Colour is $30 more expensive than the Libra 2, but you get a lot for $220. If it were just an ereader, the lovely colors, responsive reading experience, fast page turns and easy highlights would make it worth the price. But you also get features that make it more than just an ereader, like Dropbox and Google Drive integration, a beta web browser and free-writing and text-converting notebooks.
Of course, the stylus costs extra and you won’t get features like notebooks and writing in the margins without it. Together, the set costs $290, which is a considerable $110 cheaper than the recently updated (and most popular) stylus-enabled ereader the Amazon Kindle Scribe. It’s also cheaper than Kobo’s own 10-inch model, the Elipsa 2E. The Scribe has a, 10.2-inch screen and the Elipsa 2E has a 10.3-inch screen. That’s a nice size for writing but, for me, is a little big for an ereader. The Libra Colour on the other hand has just the right features at the right size, plus some extras that stretch its usefulness. Amazon used to have an ereader with buttons in the Kindle Oasis, but that model has been discontinued.
Pros
Premium build that’s comfortable to hold
Crisp text and lovely colors
Responsive and intuitive touch controls and buttons
When I reviewed the new Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition, I was struck by the elevated reading experience it provided. It’s remarkably fast, the text is wonderfully crisp and it has a premium design that feels great to hold. Amazon was able to improve page turn and scrolling speeds for both the standard Paperwhite and the Signature Edition by giving them new processors and using an oxide thin-film transistor layer to enable faster changes on the page. The layer also allows for better display clarity than other transistor layers.
Both the standard and Signature models have warm front lights that cast a lovely glow across a screen that’s a little larger now at 7-inches (up from 6.8 last time). The battery life is longer, promising up to 12 weeks (instead of 10), meaning you’ll rarely need to charge your ereader. Despite that, the Paperwhite models are actually three millimeters thinner than the previous generation (and just a touch heavier).
With the Signature Edition, you also get auto-adjusting front lights that dim or brighten as daylight fades or you move from room to room. The storage capacity goes up from 16GB to 32GB, so even if you download a whole bunch of audiobooks, you aren’t likely to run out of space too quickly. And finally, you get a wireless charging option for the periodic occasions when it’s time for a refill. All of those features are nice to have, though not necessary — but for anyone who wants to read ebooks in the most luxe way possible, the Signature model is the one to go for.
If you want an experience that’s nearly as deluxe, but don’t need the wireless charging, auto-adjusting lights and extra capacity specs, the non-Signature Paperwhite is still noticeably more premium than the standard Kindle, with a larger screen, ultra-crisp text and a luxurious build. Plus you still get access to all the perks that only Kindles offer, like Goodreads integration, Kindle Exclusive titles, Kindle Unlimited subscription books and Whispersync tech that lines up your audio and ebook reads so you can swap between the two formats.
There’s also the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite Kids, which is the same gadget, but comes with a cover, a longer warranty and a six-month subscription to Amazon Kids+.
Pros
Screen displays crisp text with a lovely warm light
Flush-front screen and soft-touch back feel premium
Noticeably faster page turns and scrolling
Auto-adjusting warm front light is helpful
Cons
Power button on the bottom edge is easy to accidentally trigger
Can’t adjust touch screen controls
Fewer page and font adjustments than the competition
The features exclusive to the Signature aren’t essential
Screen size: 7” | Display type: Black/white and color E Ink | Resolution: 300 dpi black & white, 150 dpi color | Capacity: 64GB | Battery life: Weeks | Waterproof rating: splash-resistant | Warm light: Yes | Lock screen ads: No | Text formats: PDF, CAJ, DJVU, CBR, CBZ, EPUB, EPUB3, AZW3, MOBI, TXT, DOC, DOCX, FB2, CHM, RTF, HTML, ZIP, PRC, PPT, PPTX, PNG, JPG, BMP, TIFF
Color E Ink screens are the “new” thing in ereaders — even though the tech has been commercially available since around 2010. E Ink announced its Kaleido 3 display in 2022, and with the right combination of color saturation and clarity, it’s now appealing enough for general consumption. Now Boox, Kobo and, at last, Amazon all have models with color screens.
The Boox Go Color 7 (available from Amazon and Boox) is a natural choice to supplant our previous winner in this category, the Boox Page. The Go Color 7 not only adds color, it also comes with double the storage capacity, an extra gig of RAM and ships with Android 12. The back is now textured instead of slick, an upgrade my accident-prone fingers are grateful for, and the processor is faster too, going from a 2.0Ghz octa core CPU to a 2.4Ghz chip. This all comes at the same $250 list price as the Page. The battery has the same 2,300mAh capacity, but ereader batteries last the order of a few weeks, so an upgrade in that department wasn’t really necessary.
Since the Go Color 7 runs on a fork of Android 12, it acts more like a tablet than a conventional ereader. Like all Boox devices, this approach is best suited for the tech-savvy. Unlike a Kindle or Kobo, which come preconfigured with a store to buy books, as well as easy borrowing from your local library system, Boox ereaders offer little hand-holding in setup and usage. While there is a store, it’s made up of public domain titles — most people will read books by uploading ePubs manually. Or, more likely, you’ll read on a third-party ereader app like Kobo, Kindle, Libby and others, which you’ll download from the built-in Google Play store.
Boox’s built-in ereader app, NeoReader, is nicely featured with a good amount of control over the look of the text. But it only handles DRM-free ePub files from sites like Project Gutenberg or publishers like Tor. If you want to read ePubs with digital rights management, which make up the vast majority of current ebooks, you’ll need to use a different app. Ironically, I’ve been using the ereader app from PocketBook (a rival company) to read the DRM ePubs I purchase from third parties.
The Go Series readers are impressively customizable, with programmable buttons and fine-tunable settings. Boox users have created APK files to tweak and improve the experience further. The device even has a microphone and speakers, and can run apps like Spotify. In short, the Go Color 7 can do far more than a typical ereader can, if you’re willing to experiment.
The experience is enhanced with a soft, adjustable front light with temperature control that makes for pleasant low-light reading and the flush, glare-free, screen is lush and detailed. Like all color ereaders, you do give up a modicum of clarity to accommodate the color array, and the warmth is noticeably more yellow. I only noticed the contrast when I set comparable ereaders side-by-side and, really, it’s the difference between a super duper crisp screen and only a super crisp screen.
The soft and muted colors have a saturated look like watercolors or old comic book illustrations. Comparing the same book cover on the Kobo Clara Colour and this, the Boox hues do look a touch grainier and less rich. But that’s a small sacrifice if you need an ereader that can do far more than just carry your books around.
Boox has the widest range of formats of any ereader company I’ve tested — and the Boox Palma is the most fun. It’s the same size and shape as a smartphone and, in a lot of ways, it acts like one, too. The home screen is a muted black-and-white version of what you might find on a standard Android phone — you can even add widgets. Like most Boox devices, it can download and run apps from the Google Play Store and has speakers to play music and videos. The E Ink screen (a Carta 1200) renders text crisply, but images, particularly moving ones, look grainier and rougher than they would on a real phone’s LCD or OLED screen. That said, the video quality is the best I’ve seen on an E Ink screen, thanks to a software improvement Boox calls Super Refresh Technology.
The latest generation of the Palma adds an upgraded processor, a fingerprint unlock button and ships with Android 13, all of which should make it even more capable. But make no mistake, it’s not going to replace your phone. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are the only connectivity and the 16MP camera is just for making document scans you can convert to PDFs. But the phone-like build is comfortingly familiar and the E Ink screen is lovely to read. At $280, it’s more expensive than a standard ereader — and even some E Ink tablets — but it’s a highly portable way to read Kindle, Kobo, Google Books and other ePubs, while also handling simple games and apps like a smartphone. If you’re sick of the glow of your handset, the Boox Palma is a charming alternative.
Plenty of apps, including the Kindle app, will let you download and read digital books on an iPhone, Android Phone or tablet. But what makes ebook readers different is the screen: nearly all of them use technology from a company called E Ink. It manufactures electronic paper displays (EPD) composed of three sheets: one containing millions of microcapsules filled with black and white ink particles sandwiched between transparent electrode layers. When a charge is applied, either the black or white particles shift to the top, forming letters and the whitespace around them.
Color ereaders add a color filter array on top of the standard black and white microcapsule layer. The result is two different resolutions on one screen — the color clarity is 150 dpi while black and white images and text are still 300 dpi.
Because these displays are so different from standard backlight LED panels, you can expect most good ereaders to do a number of things well. They’ll be easier to stare at for long periods of time and easier to read in direct sunlight. Also, since E Ink displays only require power to rearrange the ink, these devices have much longer battery lives than even the best tablets: we’re talking weeks on a single charge, not days.
The ereader market is not as saturated as, say, the smartphone market, but there are still plenty of options out there and they do have small but important differences among them. They tend to range from around $100 to more than $400, though usually the higher end options are stylus-enabled read/write E Ink tablets like the Kindle Scribe. Beyond price, you should consider physical properties like buttons, lights, storage and resolution, as well as how the software lets you find and access books.
Reading features
With any ereader, you’ll navigate the OS via taps and swipes, and some add physical page-turn buttons. Most with built-in buttons have an auto-rotating screen so you can press with your right or left hand.
As E Ink technology has advanced, resolution has greatly improved – even the budget Kindle ereader has a 300 ppi display. You can still find models with lower resolution, but we don’t recommend them.
Some ereaders have front LEDs that support light temperature adjustment. That means you can switch to a warmer light after the sun goes down, which will feel easier on the eyes. If you’re concerned about blue light, you should go for a reader with that feature. Finally, dark mode is available on most later model ereaders, allowing you to invert the black and white text and background, which some people find easier to read in low-light settings.
Other features
The capabilities of these pocket libraries have advanced considerably since the early days. In addition to storing books, some let you browse the web, run apps and play music. The screen’s frame rate can’t handle gaming, but it’s good enough to show you the Wikipedia entry for Striver’s Row while you read Crook Manifesto.
If you listen to audiobooks, you may want a Bluetooth-enabled ereader capable of playing them. Most of the models we tested have that ability, with the notable exception of the Nook ereader we tried. Keep in mind that audiobook files can take up more space than print files so you’ll probably want a device with a higher storage capacity if you plan on doing a lot of listening.
Above all, you should consider where and how you intend to find books to read. Most ereaders make it easiest to shop through their own digital bookstores, but all of them (even Kindles) will now let you download titles from other sources, like libraries, unaffiliated ebook sellers and free public domain sites.
Photo by Amy Skorheim / Engadget
How to get books for your ereader
Kindle, Nook and Kobo all have their own stores that you access directly from each brand’s devices. Prices are the same among all sellers, too. Publishers set the price of an ebook, not the retailer, so a title will cost the same at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, eBooks.com and the Kobo store.
Amazon offers Kindle Unlimited for $12 per month, and it includes four million titles from which you can pick your next read. It includes audio and ebooks, but you won’t find many big, new releases or older bestsellers. Kobo has a subscription called Kobo Plus with about 1.3 million titles: it goes for $8 per month for ebooks only, $8 for audiobooks only or $10 for both.
Buying a book from a proprietary store instantly delivers it to your device, provided you’re connected to WiFi. It also syncs your reading across devices and apps, so you can pick up where you left off on your phone if you forgot your ereader at home. It truly is the most convenient way to go, but if you don’t want to be locked into one brand’s store, or if you opt for an ereader without its own marketplace, you do have options.
How to upload ePubs onto an ereader
Stores like ebooks.com and Google Play have millions of ebooks for sale as digital rights-managed (DRM) ePub files, which Kobo, Nook and PocketBook readers can read in their native ereader apps. Kindles don’t support DRM ePub files at all and Boox devices require third party reading apps (of which there are many) to read those files. Titles from Apple Books are only readable in iOS devices.
Titles from some publishers like Tor and public domain classics from sites like Project Gutenberg are also sold as ePubs, but without the added DRM. Consequently, Kindles and the Boox Neoreader do support those files. Books you get from third-party sources will look just like ones you bought from a proprietary store, thanks to the flowable, formatted nature of ePub files. While these device-agnostic ebook collections give you extra options for finding your next read, they require a few additional steps to get the files onto your ereader.
To do so, you’ll typically need a computer running a free program called Adobe Digital Editions (ADE). After buying and downloading the ePub file, open ADE and plug your ereader into your computer (all readers here have a USB-C port for charging and data transfers). Your device should pop up in the left panel. Drag and drop the ePub file from your downloads folder into the main panel in ADE. The file will display as an image of the book cover. Drag that image onto your device on the left panel. If the file includes digital rights management (which protects against unauthorized copying) you’ll need to authorize your ereader, which requires using or creating a free Adobe ID. Once you’ve finished adding files to upload, eject the reader from your computer to complete the transfer process.
Kindles use a web-based uploader instead of the ADE method. But since Kindle uses its own proprietary DRM technology instead of Adobe’s, the only files it can accept from third parties are non-DRM files, such as from Tor Publishing or Project Gutenberg. After downloading a compatible ePub file, drag and drop it into your browser with the Send to Kindle page open. As long as you’re signed into Amazon, this wirelessly transfers the files to your associated device.
Boox also uses a browser uploader called BooxDrop (along with many other methods) to deliver ePubs to the device. Open it from the Boox App menu and you’ll see a device-specific url. Type that into your browser to access a file delivery portal that uploads to your library. Boox’s built-in ereader app, NeoReader, also doesn’t support files with DRM, so you won’t be able to read current titles from most publishers using that app. Fortunately, Boox devices run nearly every ereader app out there, Kobo and Kindle included, letting you access ePubs any number of ways.
Recently, Bookshop.org, the online seller of physical books that supports indie bookstores, started selling ebooks and up to 100 percent of the profits will go to local booksellers. The company uses a different rights management system than ADE so, right now, you can only read titles you buy from them on the Bookshop.org app, but the company is working with the makers of both Kindle and Kobo to extend compatibility to those ereaders.
How to read library books on an ereader
Your local library card lets you borrow audio and ebooks through a program called Overdrive and its companion app Libby. On a Kobo, you have have built-in access to Overdrive in a separate tab. Once you’ve linked your public library card, the search function will include results for titles available from your local library system; a few taps will upload your selections to your device for the length of the loan. I personally find it easiest to borrow the title I want through the Libby app on my phone. After that, the book pops up on my Kobo’s home screen once the device syncs.
To read library books on a Kindle, you can either go through the Libby app or the Overdrive section of your library’s website. Once you click Borrow, you’ll see the option to “Read now with Kindle,” which takes you to Amazon’s site to sign in. After that, the book will be delivered to your device the next time it connects to WiFi.
For other ereaders, you’ll go through your library’s Overdrive portal and download the ePub after clicking the Borrow button. You can then use the ADE process we described above. Devices that run external apps, like Boox’s Page, Go Color 7 or Palma, allow you to read library books via the Libby app, just as you would on a smartphone or iPad.
You can also use the Libby app to borrow audiobooks, but you won’t be able to access them through your ereader. (The exception is an ereader, like a Boox device, that allows external apps). I found it was easier to listen to an audiobook on my phone anyway, regardless of whether I borrowed it through Libby or bought it from Kindle or Kobo.
Photo by Amy Skorheim / Engadget
How we test ereaders
When putting together any guide, the first thing we do is spend hours researching the field. We look at what’s available, what’s new, and what shoppers and professional reviewers have to say. Then we narrow a list to the best candidates for hands-on testing.
Over the course of the past two years, I’ve tested just over a dozen ereaders, representing five different brands: Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Boox and PocketBook. I bought, borrowed and uploaded books for each device using the methods above. I used each one for between a few days to a few months. I evaluated each one in the areas of book access, ease of reading, extra features and overall value. Here’s everything we tested so far:
Other ereaders we tested
Amazon Kindle Colorsoft
Amazon’s first color Kindle impressed with its quick page-turns and load times, auto-adjusting front light and, of course, a decently striking color E Ink display. But at $280, it’s more expensive than all of the other color ereaders in its size range, including the Kobo Libra Colour and the Boox Go Color 7.
Also, some Colorsoft owners reported seeing a yellow band at the bottom of their ereader’s display. This issue did not affect our first review unit during the original testing period, but it eventually appeared. An Amazon spokesperson told Engadget: “A small number of customers have reported a yellow band along the bottom of the display. We take the quality of our products seriously—customers who notice this can reach out to our customer service team for a replacement or refund, and we’re making the appropriate adjustments to ensure that new devices will not experience this issue moving forward.”
Amazon sent us a new Colorsoft ereader at the end of 2024 and it does appear that the fixes the company made resolved the yellow-band issue. The screen on our second review unit appears warmer overall, but not overly so. It’s more akin to the screen on the Kobo Libra Colour, and that’s a good thing.
Boox Go 7 stylus-enabled ereader
Boox recently released two new stylus-enabled generations of their seven-inch reader: The monochrome Go 7 and a color-screen Go Color 7 (Gen II). After trying out the stylus-enabled Go 7, I still like the standard, non-stylus enabled version better. True, I liked the Notebook app with its array of handwriting templates and I appreciated the low-to-no latency with the stylus. It also offers a good assortment of brush, pen and style options. But outside of the Notebook app, I didn’t find much use for the stylus.
I was able to doodle in the margins of DRM-free books in Boox’s native NeoReader, but it doesn’t work in other apps or on any rights-managed books. There’s a FreeMark option that allows you to draw or write atop any app, but it saves your doodles as separate images, as opposed to allowing you to mark up the page itself. I also found enabling the stylus to be a little glitchy. If you plan to do a lot of writing, you’ll probably be better served by an E Ink tablet, but if you want an ereader that can mark up your books, I suggest going with the Kobo Libra Color, detailed above.
Ereader FAQs
What’s the difference between an ereader and an e-ink reader?
Really, they are the same thing. E Ink is a company that designs and manufactures the paper-like screens found in most ereader devices. Technically, anything you read ebooks on can act as an ereader, so your phone, iPad or Android tablet could all serve that purpose, but they’re not considered dedicated ereaders. While there are some devices marketed as ereaders that have LCD or OLED screens instead of E Ink, they aren’t as common. One of the benefits of ereaders is the E Ink screen’s paper-like quality, which causes less eye strain for many people.
But there is a difference between ereaders and E Ink tablets. These larger e-ink devices also employ E Ink screens, but they have stylus input and are often used for note taking and other tasks in addition to reading ebooks. We have an entire guide devoted to helping you pick out an E Ink tablet.
Are there ads on my ereader?
The base model Kindle and Kindle Paperwhite come with ads by default, but you can opt to pay $20 to remove them, either at the time of purchase or after you start using the device. The ads are limited to the lockscreen and are typically for other books or Kindle services. Kobo and Boox ereaders don’t come with ads.
Which ereader has the longest battery life?
Of the devices we tested, the Boox Go Color 7 has the largest listed battery capacity at 2,300mAh (Amazon doesn’t list the capacity of its Kindle devices). But thanks to the nature of E Ink screens and the relatively limited processing power required to display e-books, nearly all ereaders can go for weeks before they need a recharge. That means battery life probably isn’t as much of a deciding factor in buying an ereader as it would be with a tablet or smartphone.
Which ereaders can read Kindle books?
Amazon’s Kindle ereaders are the obvious answer, but other devices capable of running apps can also read titles from the Kindle store. For example, you can download the Kindle app on a Boox ereader through Google Play (the store comes standard in the Boox app menu). You can then sign into your Kindle account and access all the books in your library — the same way you’d read Kindle books on your phone or tablet.
Can you buy Kindle books without a Kindle?
Yes. You can buy Kindle books through the Kindle app or through Amazon’s website via a browser. You can read those titles on a Kindle or any device that can run the Kindle app, such as a smartphone, tablet or computer. Just be aware that Kindle titles can only be read through one of Amazon’s ereaders or the Kindle app. The company uses proprietary digital rights management on all ebooks it sells that can’t be read by other ereader apps like Kobo or Adobe ADE.
What’s the difference between Kindle and Kobo?
Both Kindle and Kobo are brands of dedicated ereaders that support searching, buying, downloading and reading ebooks from their own stores. Both also support borrowing books from your local library via Overdrive and Libby.
The difference is that Kindle is owned by Amazon and uses the Kindle store, whereas Kobo is owned by Rakuten and its books come from the Kobo store. Both stores come pre-loaded as a tab on their respective ereader and both carry most in-print books. Each store also carries their own exclusive ebooks as well, but Amazon’s library of Kindle-only books is much larger than Kobo’s. Amazon also offers Amazon Original stories to read on the Kindle, which are free short fiction and nonfiction reads that are free to Prime members.
Which ereader is best for library books?
Both Kobos and Kindles have simple systems for borrowing library books. Other ereaders, like Boox, let you borrow books after downloading the Libby App. Only Kobo ereaders let you search for and borrow books directly on the ereader, with a dedicated Overdrive tab. Kindles, on the other hand, utilize a convenient “read on Kindle” function from the Libby app or website. You can send a borrowed book to your Kindle just by signing into your account. Both methods are pretty easy, so which is the best for you probably depends on other factors than just the library-book feature.
Recent updates
August 2025: Included new frequently asked questions covering battery life, E Ink screens and ads on ereaders. Mentioned Amazon’s release of a cheaper Colorsoft Kindle.
July 2025: Added our impressions of the new stylus-enabled Boox Go 7 series. Updated our Boox Palma recommendation to account for the upgrades to the Boox Palma 2. Included text formats to our specs and the battery life of the Kobo Clara Colour.
March 2025: Added news about Bookshop.org getting into the ebook market. Updated information about price-setting by publishers.
January 2025: Updated the “Others we tested” section to include impressions of the second Kindle Colorsoft review unit we received.
August 2024: Replaced our Android tablet pick with the new Go Color 7 ereader from Boox. Updated book titles to current examples. Added an FAQ section to explain the difference between Kobo and Kindle ereaders and further detail library-book support on different models.
November 2024: Following the release of Amazon’s new Kindle ereaders, we tested and reviewed the Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition, the base-model Kindle and Amazon’s new color ereader, the Kindle Colorsoft. Accordingly, we updated our budget pick, added a premium pick and noted our experience with the Colorsoft.
There’s also the Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition, which has all the same features as the standard Paperwhite plus an auto-adjusting front light, wireless charging, and double the storage at 32 GB. Both versions also come in new colors including Metallic Raspberry, Metallic Jade, and Metallic Black.
Amazon also announced an all-new Kindle Paperwhite Kids. It has all the same features as the standard Paperwhite—it’s faster, thinner, and brighter—but comes with kid-friendly cases, some of which feature new designs. It also comes with a year’s subscription to Amazon Kids+ subscription (its kid-friendly content library), parental controls, and a two-year warranty.
The 2nd-Gen Kindle Scribe
The second-generation Kindle Scribe, designed for note-taking and reading, comes with a few new features on the inside and out. The display sports white borders with a paper-like display to mimic the look of a traditional sheet of paper. Meanwhile, the Premium Pen (sold separately) now has a soft-tipped eraser that feels like the one you’d find on a No. 2 pencil.
Photograph: Brenda Stolyar
There are a few new software features in the Scribe too. There’s Active Canvas, which allows you to write directly within the book you’re reading (this was a big complaint we had with the original when we reviewed it). While making notes, it’ll flow around the text and anchor the ink to the exact spot you annotated. That way, if you resize the text or the book layout changes, it won’t lose its spot. In the future, you’ll also be able to take advantage of expandable margins—so you can write in the side panel and hide the notes when you’re done.
And if you thought you were safe from generative artificial intelligence in a hardware launch story about Kindles, you were wrong. Say hello to “Refined Writing” and “Summarization.” With Refined Writing, you can tap a button to refine your notes into a script font so that it’s legible but also looks more presentable. Summarization quickly summarizes pages of notes into bullets within a script font that you can share directly from the notebook tab.
You can preorder the new Kindle Scribe now for $400, and it ships on December 4.
Digital paper is really here. The ReMarkable Paper Pro is an E-ink tablet with an 11.8″ 2160 x 1620 display. It has colored ink particles that allow it to display nine colors, which can also be blended into new ones. It has a low-glare backlight, a satisfying paper-like texture, and comes with a stylus. It also has an optional keyboard attachment.
E-paper, or E-ink displays, use tiny color-changing capsules to display high-contrast, daylight-readable images with a minimum of electricity. David Zhang shows off a neat use for an E-paper screen—an always-on desktop display with widgets for the time, date, weather, and device status of his computer. It’s not for sale, but David did share source code.
