Review: Kobo Aura HD

Battling the e-reader juggernaut Amazon is tough. Just ask Barnes & Noble.

Yet, Kobo lives on – not just surviving, but thriving. The Japanese company's success in the e-reader market can be pinned equally on its strong international presence and its willingness to create a product specifically tuned to the wants and needs of its most hardcore customers.

The Kobo Aura HD is a device for those hardcores: people who not only crave a better e-ink screen (really, who doesn't?), but also those who pay closer attention to a device's design. Most of all, they're people who root for the little guy. They shop at independent bookstores and routinely pick titles from small publishers, side-loading them on their e-readers. They're also people who prefer to contribute to the success of a hardware device not made by the bigger, more dominant company.

In this case, the rewards aren't just warm and fuzzy vibes. There's a clear win: the Aura HD has the best screen on the e-reader market today. The display – a 6.8-inch, 1440 x 1080 screen with a density of 265 ppi – knocks the Kindle Paperwhite off its throne as e-ink emperor. Text appears crisper on the Aura's display than on any of the other e-readers I've tested, not just the Paperwhite.

Kobo's excellent ComfortLight feature has also been upgraded, and surpasses the Kobo Glo's screen – not an easy feat, considering the Glo bested the bunch in that department. The light leans more toward yellow than the Glo, so it isn't as harsh and it gives the screen a hue that more closely resembles the printed page. The brightness levels are nearly uniform from edge to edge with a only a very slight dark area at the bottom of screen – ironically, where the actual lights reside. Compound that with Kobo's TypeGenius feature that can fine-tune a font's size, weight and sharpness (a wonderful add for not just font nerds, but for the visually impaired) and you have a reading environment that's superior in every way.

Although it is more expensive ($170), there's a good chance most of the Aura HD's high-end features will eventually land on a more reasonably priced Kobo in the future. Like the smartphone world, each generation of e-readers has a display that's slightly better than the one before it.

The bibliophile love fest also extends to the back of the Aura, where two slightly raised ridges run from top to bottom. The tiny peaks create a more ergonomic, grabble device. But it's clearly built with right-handed readers in mind. The peak on the left-hand side is slightly wider than the right, something southpaws with tiny hands may find uncomfortable.

Besides ignoring the customers of the Leftorium, the design of the Aura is beautiful. Well, almost beautiful. The power button is bright red, and it sticks out visually like, well, like a shiny red button. It reminds me of the red buttons they used to put on the bottoms of toys in the 1980s.

Page flips, which you initiate by touching the screen, were super-fast in my testing thanks to a 1GHz processor. Kobo says the e-reader is 25 percent quicker than others on the market. It does seem faster, but e-readers have gotten to the point where page turns are zippy enough that another 25 percent isn't really that big of a deal. The Aura HD also has 4GB of on-board storage, and if that's not enough (it certainly will be for almost everyone) there's a microSD slot that supports up to another 32GB.

In all, it's a spectacular e-reader, but it suffers from the shortcomings of a device intended for a niche audience. Largest of these downsides is the ecosystem. While the Kobo bookstore is on par with Amazon's Kindle bookstore for most of the big titles and mainstream books you want to read, it still lacks the Kindle exclusives Amazon has used to fuel its device's impulse power – things like Kindle Singles and exclusive novellas from superstar authors like Stephen King. Of course, you can easily side-load books from any store onto the Aura HD, but you're losing that one-click experience Amazon has perfected. Also missing: the great cloud-based Kindle stuff like X-Ray.

The other big shortcoming is the price. I'm sure there are people willing to pay $170 for the awesome hardware, but the masses won't. After all, that's $30 more expensive than the best ad-free Kindle Amazon sells. And in a very odd decision, Kobo is only selling the Aura HD "for a limited time," and there's no word on when that time will end.

The Aura might be the best e-reader on the market (it is), but it's tough to recommend that anyone currently swimming in the Kindle pool hop the fence and join Kobo's party. Amazon has created a robust ecosystem that rewards readers who go all-in, and once you've tasted those rewards, you'll miss them too much. But if you're a ravenous book lover who has largely ignored the Amazon Prime extras, and you don't really care what Stephen King is doing, the Aura HD is the best of the e-readers.

WIRED Best e-reader screen – remarkable sharpness and quality of lighting. Comfortable for righties. Font tweaking helps create a more pleasurable reading experience. Great battery life – at least a few weeks with Wi-Fi turned off. Side-loading titles is easy.

TIRED Kobo's ecosystem is eclipsed by Amazon's. Not so comfortable for lefties. Price is too high. Ugly red power button.