Best E-Readers Right Now in the UK and Europe (2026)

Ask three questions. Where do your books come from? If the answer includes a public library or more than one shop, Kobo's native EPUB support and built-in Libby and OverDrive borrowing settle it immediately. Do you write on it? An 11-inch writing surface with a magnetic pen is a completely different device from a 6-inch reader with a stylus bolted on. And what do you read? Colour E Ink helps comics, textbooks, magazines and annotated notes, and slightly softens plain prose, so a monochrome panel is genuinely sharper for novels. Weight and waterproofing decide the rest, and Kobo wins both.

The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft is the first Scribe you can write on in colour, announced on 4 December 2025 and shipping from 10 December, with a Fig edition following on 28 January 2026. It uses a custom stack of colour filter, light guide and nitride LEDs on an 11-inch oxide panel with texture-moulded glass, in a redesigned chassis Amazon quotes at 5.4mm and 400g. You get ten pen colours, five highlighters, a shader tool, a magnetic pen that never needs charging and a quad-core chip Amazon rates at 40 per cent faster. Its AI notebook search is the first genuinely useful AI feature on an e-reader.

If colour is a nice-to-have rather than the point, the monochrome Kindle Scribe is the better screen and the smaller bill. It shares the redesigned body, the quad-core chip, the new miniaturised front-light array that allowed narrower bezels, and the same charge-free magnetic pen, but without the colour filter that very slightly softens black-and-white text. Amazon also sells a cheaper Kindle Scribe without a front light, which arrived in early 2026 for people who only ever read and write in good light. All three share the document workflow: Google Drive and OneDrive import, PDF export and OneNote integration.

The Kobo Libra Colour remains the best all-round e-reader in Europe for people who actually borrow books. It is a 7-inch E Ink Kaleido 3 panel at 1264x1680, giving 300 pixels per inch in black and white and 150 in colour, with physical page-turn buttons, 32GB of storage, ComfortLight PRO, a 2050mAh battery quoted at up to 40 days, IPX8 waterproofing to an hour in two metres of water and a body that is at least 85.5 per cent recycled content. It reads 15 formats natively, supports the Kobo Stylus 2 and integrates Libby and OverDrive for library borrowing.

Both are 6-inch, 174g, 112 by 160 by 9.2mm, IPX8 and 16GB, and both read the same 15 formats with Libby support and Bluetooth audiobooks. The difference is the panel. The Kobo Clara Colour uses E Ink Kaleido 3 at 1448x1072, giving colour covers and highlights at 150 pixels per inch. The Kobo Clara BW uses a monochrome E Ink Carta 1300 HD panel at the same resolution, which is noticeably crisper for prose and lasts far longer, with Kobo quoting up to 53 days against 42. Neither supports a stylus. For pure novel reading, the Clara BW is the purist's pick.

Skip the Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition unless you specifically want colour without a stylus, since it dates from 2024 and Amazon has said nothing about a successor. Skip any Scribe if you mainly read fiction, because 400g is the wrong shape for a paperback replacement. Skip Amazon entirely if library borrowing matters, because Libby is not built in. As for waiting: Kobo's chief executive has teased a product for the second half of 2026 described as changing how people read and write, and Amazon is reported to be planning a wider Kindle refresh late in the year. Neither is confirmed.