Short answer: Pick the ecosystem you'll buy books from first, then the screen size for how you read. Most people want a 6–7 inch waterproof reader with an adjustable warm front light — that covers bedtime and bath reading beautifully. Only pay extra for colour or note-taking if you specifically need them; for plain reading, a great black-and-white screen still wins.
E-readers are refreshingly simple, but a few choices shape years of reading. Here's what each spec means, how much it moves our 0–100 score, and what's typical across the readers we track. The biggest factor barely shows up as a spec: which store's books you'll be reading.
Torn between the top two? See our head-to-head: Kobo Libra Colour vs Kobo Sage →
The screen is the whole point, and it carries the most weight in our score. E Ink looks like paper and reads perfectly in sunlight, unlike a tablet. Sharpness is set by pixel density — our tracked readers hit a median 300 PPI, and 300 PPI is the gold standard for crisp text. A front light lets you read in the dark, and an adjustable warm light (73% of ours) shifts to amber for comfortable night reading. Colour E Ink exists (36% of ours) but it's muted and lower-resolution — great for comics and covers, unnecessary for novels.
A few features decide the experience. Waterproofing (45% of the readers we track carry an IPX8 rating) means bath, beach and poolside reading without worry — genuinely worth having. Physical page-turn buttons (versus tap-only) are a personal preference many readers love. And if you want to annotate or handwrite notes, look specifically for a stylus-capable model — 55% of ours support one — since most readers don't.
These almost never decide a purchase, but a couple are worth a glance. Even the smallest storage holds thousands of books, so you only need more for large comic or PDF libraries or offline audiobooks. Battery is measured in weeks, so don't sweat the number. If you switch between reading and listening, check for audiobook support (82% of ours) via Bluetooth — but note there's no speaker, so you'll need headphones.
The least visible spec matters most: which bookstore you're buying into. The big ecosystems tie you to their store and app, and the convenient path is to stay inside one. The practical wrinkle is format support — native EPUB and library-borrowing support (which varies by brand) determine how easily you can read books bought elsewhere or borrowed from a public library. If you already own a big library on one store, that usually settles the decision.
You hold a reader one-handed for hours, so size and weight matter more than they sound. A 6-inch reader is the most pocketable; 7 inches adds comfortable screen area without much bulk; larger 8–10 inch models suit PDFs, comics and note-taking but need two hands. A flush glass front and warm, even lighting make long sessions easier on the eyes. Pick the size for how and where you read, not the biggest screen available.
Every figure above is computed from our own catalogue. These independent references — including non-English outlets — back the general technical claims, so you can verify them yourself.
The figures in this guide are computed live from the 11 e-readersin our catalogue and update as it grows — analysis by the Let’s Compare Data Engine.