As expected, Rakuten-owned eBook company Kobo has launched a new eReader. It’s called the Kobo Clara HD, and it features a 6 inch, high-resolution E Ink display, a front-lit display with support for reducing blue light at night, and a $130 price tag.

It’s up for pre-order now from the Kobo website.

The Kobo Clara HD features an E Ink Carta display with 300 pixels per inch, 8GB of storage, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, and a micro USB port.

This is basically Kobo’s latest answer to Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite. It has a similar display size, touchscreen controls, an illuminated display, and twice as much storage space as Amazon’s eReader.

While the $130 price tag is higher than the $120 starting price for a Kindle Paperwhite, Kobo’s devices don’t include “special offers” (ads) on the lock screen. If you want an ad-free Kindle you need to pay an extra $20 to remove them, which means the Kobo Clara HD is actually $10 cheaper than an ad-free Paperwhite.

It supports 14 different file formats including EPUB, PDF, MOBI, TXT, HTML, CBZ, and CBR and has 11 fonts and 50 font styles.

What it doesn’t have are a microSD card slot or a waterproof design.

The Kobo Clara HD measures 6.2″ x 4.3″ x 0.3″ and weighs about 5.9 ounces.

press release

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5 replies on “Kobo Clara HD eReader launches for $130”

  1. The lack of microSD is disappointing. Adding a microSD slot is cheap, and it’s easy to implement. The only real reason to exclude one falls purely into the “greed” category.

    “Do you find yourself running out of space on your Kobo Clara HD? Consider purchasing our Kobo Aura One Limited Edition instead! It has four times the storage, at barely more than double the price! Wow, what a steal of a deal!”

    1. I guess… but let’s be real here. These are e-readers – not smartphones/tablets. 8GB is a helluva lot of ebooks. The current Paperwhite has 4GB which Amazon says is enough for ~2200 books. I’ve collected ~500 ebooks on mine over 4 years but off-loaded over half of them because I observed the responsiveness to become unacceptably slow/erratic storing beyond a couple hundred ebooks. Even if Kobo devices don’t have the latter problem, the number of people that need/want immediate off-line access to more than 4000+ ebooks would seem to be exceedingly small.

      1. Agreed. I still think Kobo lost their minds when they omitted SD support on the Aura One. But that’s because an 8″ screen is far more likely to be used reading full-sheet documents – which can be huge PDFs. A few graphic novel collections from Humble Bundle or a good RPG/tabletop game library or who knows what else will burn through 8gb by breakfast, and even fill 32gb with little effort. SD support is needed in devices like the Aura One.

        But this – a lightweight 6″ ereader? That isn’t going to be filled with many large files. I can’t see it needing more than 8gb for 99% of its users. And I say this as one of those idiots who tried to put some graphic novels onto a Jetbook Lite ‘s SD card just a few years back…

    2. Watch the video. There is a neat little slot on the bottom of the Clara that opens with a needle. Pretty sure the article is wrong about sd card expansion.

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