The Clara BW, now at $139.99, costs $30 more than Amazon's $109.99 base Kindle. The Verge noted that while the Clara BW does offer waterproofing, buyers looking for a cheap entry point with access to a large ebook store are better served by Amazon's device. That's a significant shift for a brand that built its mainstream case on being the affordable alternative.

The price problem runs in both directions. At $139.99, the Clara BW sits only $20 below the $159.99 Kindle Paperwhite, which has a larger seven-inch display and what The Verge describes as noticeably better build quality from its flush-mounted screen, per The Verge. When the upgrade is that close in price and the hardware difference is visible, a lot of buyers make a different decision at checkout than they expected to.

This wasn't a one-time event. Kobo ran a comparable price increase on a similar set of models in January 2023, The Verge reported. The February 2025 move extended a pattern that has now played out twice in two years. Amazon, for its part, has not raised Kindle prices in any country where it sells, according to Good e-Reader. Kobo's price advantage in black-and-white eroded without Amazon making a single change.

The question of why Kobo spared the Elipsa 2E and Sage is harder to answer from available reporting. Both are larger, higher-priced devices aimed at a narrower audience note-takers and annotation-focused readers rather than mainstream buyers. One reasonable reading is that Kobo's pricing pressure is concentrated in the volume segment, where margin decisions have the most impact. Another is that the Elipsa 2E and Sage are aging products where a price increase would accelerate their obsolescence. The Verge describes both as "larger and aging," which may explain why Kobo chose not to draw attention to them with a price bump.

The color segment tells a different story. At $229.99, the Kobo Libra Colour is still $50 cheaper than Amazon's $279.99 Kindle Colorsoft, The Verge reported. Both run on the same underlying E Ink color screen technology, though Amazon customized its Colorsoft implementation for better vibrancy and color accuracy. The Libra Colour offsets that with physical page-turn buttons, stylus support for highlighting and note-taking, and easier sideloading of ebooks and PDFs from outside Kobo's store features the Colorsoft doesn't match. A $50 price advantage with a longer feature list is a durable argument, not a marginal one.

The Clara Colour at $159.99 holds a similar position: the cheaper color-screen option for buyers who want to stay off Amazon entirely, per The Verge.

The sideloading point deserves more than a sentence. Kobo devices support direct loading of EPUB files and PDFs, which are the formats used by library borrowing apps like Libby. For readers who work through their public library rather than buying titles outright, that matters practically, not just philosophically. Kindle's ecosystem requires extra steps for the same workflow, and Amazon-purchased books are tied to Amazon's cloud. A reader with a substantial library borrowed through Libby, or one who maintains their own digital collection of files bought from independent sources, gets more usable flexibility out of a Kobo regardless of price.

That openness argument also holds across the color models. The $50 gap between the Libra Colour and Kindle Colorsoft is real money, and the Libra Colour's additional hardware features give that gap substance. The $10 increase didn't change the structure of that comparison.

Whether prices in this category have further to move is a separate question from Kobo's February 2025 decision, and the upstream picture is worth understanding.

Memory market shifts have been putting significant pressure on the e-reader supply chain, from component manufacturers through to hardware brands, DigiTimes reported two months ago. Netronix, the world's largest e-reader original design manufacturer and the factory behind most of the industry's hardware, warned earlier this year that memory chip shortages and soaring prices could constrain e-reader shipments across 2026, per DigiTimes. That warning came from the manufacturer closest to the problem, and it covers the full category, not just Kobo.

The tariff picture is less clean. The Verge reported that Kobo's February 2025 increase did not appear to be related to tariffs or their potential impact on costs in the US and Canada, per The Verge. Good e-Reader, writing about a year ago, framed Kobo's adjustments as tariff-driven, per Good e-Reader, though the same piece contains conflicting figures on the scale of increases across different models, with numbers ranging from $10 to $80 without model-level documentation. The two accounts don't reconcile cleanly.

What Good e-Reader did report clearly is that most e-readers are manufactured in China, and that a tariff exemption covering lower-cost electronics was set to close on May 2, 2025, which the outlet noted could prompt companies to raise prices further, per Good e-Reader. reMarkable's VP of communications told Good e-Reader at the time that the company was reviewing the tariff situation and that the new levies were "likely to have a negative impact," though it was too early to assess the full financial implications.

Whether Kobo's earlier increases were driven by tariffs, component costs, exchange rates, or straightforward margin decisions isn't settled by available reporting. The sources point in different directions. What the supply chain data does establish is that structural cost pressure on the category in 2026 is running in one direction.

For first-time buyers prioritizing cost, the Clara BW's current position is a problem. At $30 above the base Kindle and $20 below the Paperwhite, it occupies a bracket where the budget argument has weakened and the upgrade argument for paying a little more is sitting right next to it, per The Verge. Buyers who already own a substantial Kindle library face a different calculation: the hardware price is largely beside the point, because switching devices means leaving that library behind. The comparison that matters for them is whether the openness and format flexibility justify starting fresh.

For buyers considering color, the Libra Colour's $50 advantage over the Kindle Colorsoft remains the most straightforward value case in Kobo's current lineup. The feature differences add weight to that number rather than just repeating it.

Kobo hasn't lost the argument. In color and for readers outside Amazon's ecosystem, the case is still concrete. In black-and-white, it now requires a specific buyer profile to land and the supply chain conditions that put pressure on Kobo's pricing haven't resolved.