The Best E-Readers of 2021

The PocketBook Inkpad 3 Pro comes with a built-in bookstore, its offerings are, to be blunt, are pretty awful. However, it could be a good option for anyone comfortable with sideloading content from their personal digital library of DRM-free e-books.

I liked its bright 7.8-inch 300 PPI display and front lighting controls. However, I did notice some significant ghosting (barely visible letters and images from the last page you read, that are there when you ‘turn’ to the next page of an e-book) between refreshes. The Inkpad 3 Pro’s reading software makes navigating a large collection of e-books easy and provides a number of features that allow for a customized reading experience. Users can use a row of physical buttons or its touchscreen to interact with the device.

The Inkpad 3 Pro is waterproof. However, I have concerns about its build quality: I found that its plastic body routinely cracked and popped.

The Onyx Boox Nova 3 is really more of a tablet with an E Ink display than an e-reader. It comes preloaded with a number of apps, including an excellent e-reading app and a note-taking application that can be used with the tablet’s included WACOM stylus. When writing or drawing on its screen there was a noticeable amount of input lag, which was jarring. The Nova 3’s bright 7.8-inch 300 DPI display was easy on the eyes, in all lighting conditions. During testing, I found the tablet felt sturdy and I appreciated that it charges and transfers data via USB-C.

The real draw of this device, however, is that as it runs a customized version of Android 10, it’s possible to add a wide variety of apps to it, such as Amazon’s Kindle app or Comixology—provided you’re able to install the Google Play app. Doing so vastly expands the number of outlets to draw reading material from.

Unfortunately, despite owning an Onyx device and having previously gone through the process, I found that installing Google’s app services to the Nova 3 took three attempts. That the device is this fussy, out of the box, could make it less accessible to less tech-savvy users.

Running on the same Android operating system as the Nova 3, the Boox Poke 3 lacks the Nova 3’s WACOM digitizer display. At 153 x 107 x 6.8mm in size and weighing a mere 150 grams, it’s small and light enough to use, one-handed, for hours at a time. Its crisp, six-inch 300 PPI display, will make you want to use it, often.

Unfortunately, it’s similar enough to its larger sibling to be subject to many of the same shortcomings. The Google Play store can be installed on the Poke3, but doing so can be a frustrating process. Additionally, the ability to install games and social media apps, and the pop-up notifications that come with them, could make your reading experience on this device less immersive.

Finally, the Poke 3’s smaller size means that it contains a smaller battery than the Nova 3. That these two e-readers are so similar in function means that you’ll get less use out of the Poke 3 than with Onyx’s larger e-reader, before it needs to be recharged.

If I had to use one word to describe the Barnes & Noble Nook GlowLight Plus, it would be ‘slow.’

While setting it up for the first time, it took forever to turn on. It took ages to find my WiFi network and a long time to create a user account. The device lets you use Gmail or Facebook accounts to sign in, but when I tried both, neither allowed me to continue with the setup process. The e-reader's snail’s pace continued once the setup was complete.
While typing with its on-screen keyboard, It took so long for what I had written to register that I was left wondering whether or not the e-reader’s operating system had accepted my input.

However, the GlowlLight Plus isn’t without its charms. Its library management system makes it easy to categorize and keep track of any books on the device. Barnes and Noble’s Nook Bookstore has a very respectable selection of reading material to choose from and it’s possible to sideload books from other sources onto the device from a computer. Whatever you choose to load on it, you’ll find that the GlowLight Plus’ crisp text and excellent color temperature-controllable front lighting make reading a pleasure—provided you can stand how long it takes to move on to the next page in your book.

The Boyue LikeBook Mars’ large 7.8-inch, 300 PPI display offers the options of either yellow or white front lighting, making for easy-on-the-eyes reading. You can start to devour books with the LikeBook Mars, as soon as you complete its brief setup process: as its e-reader app comes pre-stocked with a large variety of rights-free e-books. While it only comes with 16GB of internal storage, it can be upgraded with an additional 128GB of space for books, PDFs and apps, via its MicroSD card slot.

The LikeBook Mars is an Android device. I found that getting the Google Play Store up and running was far less frustrating than it had been with the Boox Poke3 or Nova 3. Unfortunately, thanks to having an older processor under the hood, downloaded apps load and run slow enough to be frustrating at times. Most concerning, however, is the fact that this e-reader runs on Android 6, which no longer receives security updates from Google. This fact alone makes it difficult to recommend.

If you read a lot of large-format books, like academic texts or PDFs, the reMarkable 2 is for you—with a few significant caveats.

When I tested it, the reMarkable 2 was only capable of opening two file types: ePub-formatted e-books and PDF files. This limitation could, for anyone that wants to use the device to view other file types such as Microsoft Word documents or e-books published as a .mobi file, be a deal-breaker. Another knock against it is the fact that it has no front lighting. So, you can only use it when there is enough ambient light to view its large 10.3-inch, 226 PPI display.

That said, the reMarkable 2 offers the best electronic writing experience that I have ever encountered. It was created for note-taking, drawing and annotating documents. Those PDFs and ePub files? You can write on and highlight sections of them to your heart’s content.

Using its included stylus to scribble on its display nails the feel of writing on paper. There’s no noticeable input lag—a technical feat made possible, in part, by having no front lighting to get in the way of the device’s digitizer. There are plenty of pen types and line options to choose from, making it easy to customize the device to your scribbling needs.

If scads of handwritten notes are a part of your everyday life, you’ll love this thing. Those looking for a more substantial e-reading experience should buy something else.

While it’s primarily an e-reader, the Mobiscribe is, as its name suggests, designed to take notes on the go. During testing, I noted input lag when drawing lines and letters on the e-reader’s 6.8-inch, 265 PPI display using its included WACOM stylus. Its capabilities as an e-reader were just as disappointing: its built-in reading app is adequate but basic. While perusing print books, I found that there was a significant amount of ghosting and occasional input lag.

Beyond this, I was troubled that the Mobiscribe runs on Android KitKat, an old operating system released in 2013 which Google no longer provides security updates for. That the manufacturer suggests sideloading apps (downloading apps from an online source to be manually installed) instead of equipping the Mobiscribe with the ability to access the Google Play store, exacerbates this issue.

You might think that you’re merely sideloading the Amazon Kindle or Koboapp onto this device. But, there’s no way to tell if the app is infected with malware, as it’s not coming from a trusted source. That the operating system is old enough that many of the apps available today won’t run on it, was the final nail in this e-reader’s coffin.