The Best Ebook Readers for 2021
Step away from the monitor and give your eyes a rest. Ebook readers, also called ereaders, rely on e-ink screens to let you read for long periods of time without the brain-burn that comes from a radiant LCD or OLED screen. They have very long battery life and look terrific in sunlight. Amazon’s Kindles dominate the ebook reader market in the US, but if you’re shopping around, it’s a good idea to look at models from Kobo, Nook, Onyx, Sony and PocketBook. We’ve reviewed them all.
What Screen Type and How Big?
Basic ebook readers use monochrome e-ink screens to display text. E-ink, or digital ink (often manufactured by the E Ink company), looks a lot like paper, and it’s easy on your eyes when reading for long periods. On the least expensive models, it’s not backlit, so you’ll need light to see the text, just as you would with a printed book. But most ebook readers now include edge lighting that lets you see in the dark. With each model, you can vary the intensity of the brightness from barely there to flashlight-bright. On the lowest settings, you can read in the dark while your partner sleeps peacefully next to you.
In all cases, e-ink is much easier to read in bright sunlight, while color touch screens on tablets tend to wash out, and their glossy displays can show distracting reflections.
This Onyx’s E Ink display looks nearly as good as print.
The industry seems to have settled on 6 inches as the optimal display size for e-ink readers; this is what you’ll find on most of Amazon’s Kindles, for example. There are exceptions, though: Kobo’s Forma is significantly larger, at 8 inches, and Onyx makes a wide range of different sizes, including tablets for reading full-sized documents. Except for the base-model Kindle, most recent ebook readers use the latest E Ink Carta display technology, with 300 pixels per inch.
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Manufacturers are also improving the quality of these e-ink displays. A few years ago, page refreshes were sluggish, the entire screen flashed black with each page turn, and some early ebook readers had problems with text contrast, which made for difficult reading. That’s all history. The latest readers have crisp, clear text and employ caching schemes that almost never refresh the full page; most of the time, only the letters fade out and back in again. The page refreshes are much faster than before.
How About Color?
If you need to read more than books, tablets with color screens offer a bevy of other benefits. Magazines and comic books look great on larger tablets. Even lower-cost tablets like the Fire 7 can browse the web, stream video from Netflix, Hulu or other sources, play music, and run apps. Because of its high-quality screen and general power, though, we recommend the base-model iPad for most people trying to read rich, full-page color content.
Last year saw a breakthrough in color E Ink displays, with several readers appearing based on the E Ink Kaleido or E Ink Kaleido Plus technologies. We’ve tested two of them, the Onyx Boox Nova3 Color and the PocketBook InkPad Color, that show some of the exciting possibilities of color e-ink. Unfortunately, we can’t recommend them yet; the Nova3 Color has too many problems with screen ghosting and the InkPad Color doesn’t have a good bookstore app option for the US.
The PocketBook InkPad Color has a beautiful color e-ink display.
Will You Read on the Beach?
If you like to read in the bath, by the pool, or on the beach, you might want to consider buying a waterproof ebook reader. You have several options. The Amazon Kindle Oasis, the latest Kindle Paperwhite, the Kobo Forma, and the Kobo Libra H2O are all rated to withstand submersion in water to some degree. The Kindle Oasis even has page turn buttons so you can easily flip between pages when your hands are too wet to use a touch screen.
Do You Listen to Audiobooks?
Sometimes you’d rather listen than read. Sometimes you’d like to read and listen at the same time. Kindles now have the ability to connect to Bluetooth headphones to play Audible audiobooks. Many Amazon books will synchronize with Audible audiobooks on Kindle ebook readers. Onyx ebook readers have built-in speakers and the ability to use multiple audiobook apps.
Oddly, Amazon saves its slickest audiobook feature, Immersion Reading, for its Android app, which means you need an Onyx ebook reader to use it. That feature synchronizes words displayed on the page while also narrating through audio.
What Kind of Wireless Connection Do You Need?
An always-on cellular radio lets you buy and download books from anywhere, over the air, for free (aside from the cost of the book itself, of course). Most devices offer Wi-Fi as the base level wireless connection—at a much lower cost—with 3G cellular data only available as part of a more-expensive model.
As long as you don’t mind waiting until you’re near a hotspot to shop for new books, Wi-Fi should work for you. A select few may still prefer to pony up for 3G to buy a new book while, say, on a long camping trip or lounging at the beach.
Kobo’s ebook readers work well with libraries.
Internal storage capacity is not much of a concern. Every ebook reader you can buy today can store more than 1,000 books, and some have room for thousands more. And if you have more books than that, each of the major vendors offers cloud storage, letting you download books to your device whenever you need them, assuming you’re connected to Wi-Fi hotspot (or anywhere you have a cell signal, if you have a 3G-capable model).
Where Do You Get Your Books?
When you choose an ebook reader, you’re making a decision up front as to which ecosystem you’ll support.
Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo all use copy protection on most of their books, which prevents them from being read by other brands’ ereaders. It’s possible to remove the copy protection, but you may also remove features such as formatting and character summaries. It’s also gotten much harder to strip the protection specifically from Amazon books in the past year or two. Onyx ebook readers can run all of their competitors’ Android apps, so they can read everyone’s content.
For public library lending, Kobo ebook readers let you install the popular library app Overdrive as their native store, which is very convenient. Amazon sends you through the library’s web site to pick books that get pushed to your device; Onyx has you load a specific library app.
Amazon has its own Prime Reading library, part of its Prime subscription service. For kids, the FreeTime Unlimited subscription service contains a lot of children’s books and starts at $2.99 per month. You get a free year of it when you buy the Kindle Kids Edition.
Book selection, size, and pricing varies from store to store. Books by big publishers generally appear on the Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo stores. But Amazon also has a growing number of exclusive authors and imprints that only appear on its store. Many of them are self-published and not very good, but Amazon definitely has the advantage on quantity.
For more, see How to Get Free (or Cheap) New Ebooks and How to Put Free Ebooks on Your Amazon Kindle. And for an in-depth comparison of supported formats across various ebook readers, check out Wikipedia’s article comparing ebook formats.
Amazon offers a number of different Kindles.
How Much Should You Spend on an Ebook Reader?
If you’re just reading mainstream fiction or nonfiction books, the sweet spot right now is $100–150 for a good Amazon, B&N, or Kobo device. You can get a low-end model that costs less or a larger model that costs more, but the ebook readers at this price point tend to have the best balance of screen quality and size for most books.
Onyx’s tablet-size readers cost considerably more than other ebook readers, but they’re also much more powerful, letting you run multiple reading apps, annotate PDFs, and read large-format documents on big screens. We see these as primarily for academics, lawyers, people who read medical or scientific journals, and others who read for work or school as well as for fun.
Which Ebook Reader Should You Buy?
These are our favorite dedicated ebook readers you can buy today. If you’re getting a Paperwhite, check out our 13 Paperwhite Tips Every Reader Needs to Know. And if you’d rather do your reading on a bigger screen or one with color, head over to our top tablet picks.