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Kobo’s going big. The new Kobo Elipsa is the biggest ebook reader from the firm yet, with a 10.3-inch screen and a stylus for annotating books and PDFs.
According to Kobo, annotation and markup were the big drivers here. Its announcement frames the Elipsa as more of a competitor to writing tablets like the Remarkable 2, than a way to read larger-format documents like legal briefs.
“With Kobo Elipsa, we meet the needs of people who don’t just want to read a book; they want to engage with it—mark it up, highlight, write in the margins, or in a notebook of their own, because that is how they get the most out of the books, articles, and documents they read,” Michael Tamblyn, CEO of Rakuten Kobo, said in a press release.
The Elipsa will go on pre-order today at kobo.com and will appear on store shelves on June 24. In the US, it’ll cost $399.99 for a bundle with a tablet, cover, and stylus.
This isn’t the only big e-reader out there, but it’s likely to be the easiest to use for people in the US. The $399 Remarkable 2 note-taking tablet doesn’t have a book store. The Onyx Boox Note Air runs full Android and costs $479.99, and there are less expensive (and less appealing) options from lesser-known Chinese firm Boyue and European e-reader giant Pocketbook.
Kobo’s advantage is that it has a store full of the books Americans and Canadians expect. Plus, it offers the best support for OverDrive, the system most US public libraries use, so Kobo users can install their public library essentially as a second built-in book store. Kobo tablets also support sideloading books in a range of other formats, including PDF, EPUB, and CBR/CBZ.
The Elipsa uses the same 10.3-inch, 1,404-by-1,872, 227ppi E Ink Carta screen as other 10.3-inch E Ink tablets. It has an adjustable-brightness front-light. The device weighs 13.5 ounces, about an ounce less than the Note Air. The active stylus can be used to take notes, or annotate PDFs and non-DRMed eBooks.
Kobo says the device has a “quad-core” 1.8GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage. This is an ebook reader, though, not a general-purpose Android tablet, so the processor and storage demands are much less than they would be on a general purpose device.
We’ll have a review of the Kobo Elipsa soon.
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