#Inkbook 8 volume control plus#

Fonts of Wisdom, the Wisdom of Fontsįirst off, reading ebooks on the Clara works pretty much exactly the same as reading them on the Paperwhite. I don’t know that it’s worth adding an extra $30 to the price, though. It’s a nice-enough little protective cover and doesn’t get in the way while reading. It holds closed magnetically (and puts the Kobo to sleep or awakens it when closed or open) or flips open into a triangular reading stand. Kobo also included the $29.99 Kobo Clara HD Sleepcover, a sleek flip-top case into which the Kobo snaps securely. But perhaps that can come in a future firmware update. I do agree with Nate Hoffelder that it would be nice if there were more control over the light’s color range than just being able to turn it orange at night. (I was amused to find that my phone wouldn’t even photograph the color until I disabled its auto white balance!)

The Clara HD has one of those it can tint the screen orange to remove blue frequencies of light. I haven’t had the occasion to read ebooks at night with it, so can’t report on how effective it is, but it can be enabled either manually or automatically with the sun’s cycle. In recent years, it’s become popular to make red-tinted screen lighting options available for evening reading, so as not to program your brain to think it’s still daytime.

#Inkbook 8 volume control plus#

(Possibly because black-and-white e-ink-readable digital manga is a big deal in Rakuten’s primary market area Japan, and graphics take up a lot more storage space than text.) And, as Kobo smugly trumpets in its list of specs, it also has “No advertising, no interruptions.” (Perhaps the bigger advantage here is that the Kobo’s $130 price is $10 less than the Paperwhite’s $120 price plus $20 ad-removal fee-and in Kobo’s native Canada, the C$140 list price of the Paperwhite with ads and the Kobo without is exactly the same.) The Clara HD’s night-reading mode turns the screen orange when set to its maximum level. The Clara does outshine the Paperwhite in a couple of key areas, though-for one thing, it includes 8 GB of on-board storage, where the Paperwhite only offers 4. (Note that the Clara is monochrome e-ink, even though the screenshots I captured display a color interface that can’t actually be seen on the device itself.) The screen lighting is effectively identical (with the exception of the night-reading mode I describe below), and in terms of hardware there doesn’t seem to be any significant difference in screen readability between the two.

It uses the same 6″ Carta 300 ppi e-ink touchscreen as the Paperwhite (probably literally the same screen, given that there just aren’t that many e-ink manufacturers out there), and is about the same size and weight. The Clara is Kobo’s answer to the Paperwhite line of Kindles-a frontlit, high-definition ereader that displays crisp, sharp text with a bright white background.

The Basics The Clara HD’s font weight controls allow making any font a bold version of itself. All in all, if Amazon’s ecosystem isn’t important to you, you may actually find it to be a better device than the Kindle Paperwhite. I didn’t want to post a review until I’d had time to get to know it thoroughly, so I’ve been using it to read at work, at home, and other places. I’ve been using a Clara HD review unit for the last couple of weeks, ever since Kobo got it to me just about at the same time it launched. It’s not without its flaws, but it’s got some very decent features as well. But it’s still a pretty decent e-ink reader, and one of the only good e-ink options on the market for people who don’t want to deal with Amazon for one reason or another. Is the new $129.99 Kobo Clara HD going to spark a revolution and win the ereader market back from Amazon? Probably not. The Kobo reading interface includes a number of menu options at top and bottom revealed by touching the middle of the screen, including access to annotations, an in-book search, and dictionary.