I was comfortable holding the Aura One and reading for long stretches of time, but if you’re looking for the lightest ebook reader around, the Oasis is for you. The Oasis, on the other hand, weighs 4.6 ounces. Hardcover books can be heavy, though: the last hardcover novel I read before I bought my first kindle weighed 2.8 pounds! The Aura One isn’t like that-at 8.1 ounces, it’s about the same weight as the Kindle Paperwhite. The extra reading space isn’t necessary, per se, but it does feel luxurious. There’s more text on the screen and you need to turn the page much less frequently. The end result is that reading a book on an Aura One feels like reading a hardcover, while reading on a Kindle feels like reading a paperback. That’s the same resolution as all but the cheapest of Amazon’s Kindles, but it’s a much larger screen-the Kindle screens are all only 6 inches diagonal. Let’s start with the size: The Aura One has a 7.8-inch diagonal screen with a screen resolution of 300 ppi. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by a lot of the choices Kobo has made, and while I’m not sure it’s better than the Oasis, it’s most certainly different. I bought a Kobo Aura One to try it out and have been using it for a couple of weeks, the first time I’ve used an ebook reader that wasn’t a Kindle. It’s a premium ebook reader like the Kindle Oasis, but Kobo has made a bunch of different choices about what that means and what features matter to ebook readers. So when Kobo announced the $229 Kobo Aura One, I was intrigued. First was the $290 Kindle Oasis, which is beautiful, small, and thin. But what’s more interesting are the developments at the high end of this category, where premium ebook readers have become a thing. But that still leaves a really interesting niche for people who do love reading on dedicated reading devices with screens that are more like a book’s pages than a computer’s backlit display.įor pure utility, the $120 Kindle Paperwhite is the ebook reader you should buy. After an initial flurry of excitement, we seem to have settled in on the idea that paper books and ebooks are going to coexist, and that some people who choose to read ebooks will just do so on their smartphones and tablets.

The Amazon Kindle Oasis (left) with the Kobo Aura One. Note: This story has not been updated for several years. Review: Kobo Aura One is a waterproof “hardcover” ebook reader

Kobo aura h2o waterproof ereader