Is the Kobo Clara BW a Better Six-Inch Buy Than the Kindle?

The ComfortLight PRO front light adjusts both its brightness and its color, so the page can go dim and warm at bedtime. Dark Mode flips the page to white text on black.

Kobo rates the body IPX8, for up to 60 minutes in 2 meters of water. A spilled glass of water is well within that rating.

The E Ink Carta panel has 1448 by 1072 pixels. On a six-inch diagonal that works out to 300 ppi, the figure iFixit lists too. No color layer sits over the ink, so text is drawn at the panel's full resolution and every cover shows in grayscale.

Kobo's US page lists borrowing ebooks from a local library as a feature of the reader itself.

Fifteen formats open natively, among them EPUB, PDF, MOBI, CBZ and CBR. A DRM-free book from another store opens without conversion. Kindle formats are not on Kobo's list, so books already bought from Amazon won't open on it.

Kobo lists no cloud storage for this model, so it lacks the Dropbox and Google Drive link that the Libra Colour has. Files from elsewhere go on over a USB cable, dragged onto the reader from a computer.

Kobo rates a charge at up to 53 days of reading for half an hour a day, which adds up to 26.5 hours. The footnote behind that figure sets the front light at a tenth of full brightness, with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off. At an hour a night, a charge lasts about 26 nights if you keep to that dim light and leave both radios off.

Amazon rates the 2026 Kindle at up to six weeks. Its announcement gives no conditions, so the two figures can't be set side by side.

The battery inside has changed since launch. iFixit lists two later versions, the P365 from April 2025 and the N365B from June 2025. Both carry a 1,900 mAh cell. The original N365 has 1,500 mAh, so the newer cell holds about a quarter more. Kobo's page lists only the smaller battery, under the same rating. The model number is printed near the bottom of the back cover.

When a battery wears out, iFixit sells replacement batteries, screens, motherboards and case parts for the Clara BW, with a guide for each repair. Kobo calls the reader repairable on its product page.

The Clara BW has no page-turn buttons, so pages turn with a tap or a swipe. Kobo sells a compatible accessory, the Kobo Remote, with a large forward button and a small back button. For the Kindle, Amazon sells the Kindle Click, a Bluetooth page-turn remote that works with every new Kindle.

There is no speaker either. Kobo Audiobooks play through Bluetooth headphones or a speaker, in the countries where Kobo sells them. Either one keeps Bluetooth on, and Kobo's battery rating assumes that radio is off.