Kobo Glo HD review

Interface and store

The sharper visuals make for a great interface too. The tiled front page looks good, with your recently read titles easy to access. The links to the library and Bookstore have little pop-up menus to help narrow down your needs.

The search in both Amazon’s and Kobo’s stores provides suggestions as you type, and we had no trouble finding what we wanted. Kobo quickly offered David Mitchell’s Number9Dream, but while the Paperwhite intelligently listed other Mitchell titles in the same search, the Kobo also listed a rather random smattering of other titles in its subgenre.

^ Neither store is great for browsing still, but both let you find what you want quickly via search

The book did cost 30p more than on Amazon, something we’ve found to be consistently the case in past tests. Of course, with the Kobo you can shop around, or buy books off smaller publishers directly, which will appeal to those with niche tastes who want to support their authors.

The Kobo, as an ePub reader, will let you borrow books from local libraries. However Amazon’s Kindle now has Family Sharing, so you can connect two Amazon accounts and read books between them freely.

Conclusion

Amazon sells many times more eBooks than anyone else, which may be why it looks to have become a little complacent when it comes to hardware,. The price of the Voyage will have to drop significantly, or the Paperwhite will need a big upgrade, in order to compete with the Kobo Glo HD. This is a brilliant eReader, only slightly held back by its lack of an ambient light sensor – which are unfathomably still a rarity in 2015.

If you’re buying a first eReader, or want to defect from Amazon, then the Glo HD won’t disappoint. If you have an old ePub compatible eReader and are looking to upgrade then this is the one to buy – even if your current model isn’t a Kobo, as that’s the benefit of being outside of Amazon’s walled garden. All that said, Amazon still offers a huge range of books from a single store at very competitive prices.