Kobo announced on 27 August 2026 that its eReaders had reached 500 Best Buy stores across the United States. Its own release called that the first time American buyers could shop for Kobo in a physical store. Three eReaders made the shelf, along with two accessories. For anyone who has spent weeks reading Kindle versus Kobo threads, that changes one thing in particular. You can finally look at a Kaleido colour panel with your own eyes before paying for it. What follows is what Kobo put in the aisle, what the visit is good for, and the questions a demo unit will never settle.
Three readers and two accessories
Kobo’s announcement names three eReaders: the Kobo Clara Colour, the Kobo Clara BW and the Kobo Libra Colour. Two accessories go with them, the Kobo Stylus 2 and the Kobo Remote. Michael Tamblyn, Kobo’s chief executive, framed the move in the release around exactly this problem. “Many readers want to be able to pick up a device, see the screen, and feel it in their hands before they commit. With Kobo eReaders now available at Best Buy, more American customers can do just that.”
The context behind that sentence is a long absence. Kobo’s previous US retail partnership, with Walmart, ran from 2018 and ended in 2024 without much traction. In the meantime Kindles have sat on Best Buy shelves for years. Kobo told Publishers Weekly in August that its US sales doubled in 2025 and doubled again in 2026, which is the kind of growth that earns shelf space.
Online, the picture is wider than the shop. Kobo says its eReaders are also sold through its own website, Staples and Target.
What is not on the shelf
Three models is a narrow slice of the range. The larger Kobo readers and the note-taking sizes are not named in the announcement, so a store visit will not help you decide between a Clara and something bigger. If you are weighing an eight-inch reader, you are still buying that one on trust, or from a review.
That matters more than it sounds, because screen size is the one thing people most often get wrong, and it is the one thing a shop could have fixed.
Go for the colour panel, and nothing else
One test justifies the drive. Pick up the Kobo Clara Colour and the Kobo Clara BW, put them side by side, and open plain text on both.
The Clara Colour uses a Kaleido 3 layer that renders colour at roughly half the density of the black and white text underneath it. That filter sits over the screen whether or not anything on the page is coloured. On paper it is a specification. In your hands it is the difference between sharp text and text that reads slightly softer and greyer. Only you can decide whether that trade is worth the covers and comic panels you gain.
Do the same with the Kobo Libra Colour if you are undecided about physical page-turn buttons. Two minutes of holding it one-handed, thumb on the button, tells you more than any amount of reading about ergonomics. Some people find the asymmetric grip perfect. Some find it heavy in the wrong place.
What a demo cannot settle
Shop lighting is bright, even and nothing like a bedside lamp, so the front light will look better in store than it does at home. Set the warmth to maximum before you judge it, because that is the setting most people end up living with.
Battery life is unknowable in the aisle. So is how the reader behaves with two thousand sideloaded books in the library. So is how quickly it wakes after three days asleep, and whether the page refresh grates across a four-hundred-page novel. Those are the complaints that turn into returns, and none of them surface in five minutes.
There is also a practical catch. When Kobo first appeared in Best Buy in early August, coverage noted that US stores did not yet have live demo units in the way Canadian stores do. Kobo’s own release describes customers being able to browse, touch and purchase. The two statements may reflect a rollout in progress. Either way, phone the branch before driving out, and ask specifically whether they have a working unit on display or only boxes on a peg.
The checklist to take with you
Set the font to the size you read at. Open a page of plain prose, not a cover. Turn the front light to its warmest setting and then to its coolest, and see which one you would use at night. Hold each device one-handed for a full two minutes. Press the page buttons on the Libra Colour. Look at a colour cover last, because it is the most flattering thing on the screen and it will bias everything you looked at before it.
And check Kobo’s own store price before you pay at the till. Kobo’s price match guarantee changed recently, so the arithmetic that used to favour buying direct may not hold.
Is the trip worth making
If you are choosing between colour and black and white, yes, and it is close to the only way to get a real answer. Photographs of e-paper are taken under studio lights and consistently make Kaleido look better than it is in a living room.
Anyone who already knows they want a monochrome reader gets a feel for the size and the buttons from the visit, which is useful but not decisive. Order it online and read the return policy instead.
