$99 E-Reader War: Kobo Touch vs. Amazon Kindle Touch vs. B&N Nook Simple Touch

Kobo Touch with Offers is just like the Kobo Touch eReader but includes valuable offers and sponsored screens in discrete places outside of the reading experience, Kobo said in a statement.

Kobo, which recently agreed to be acquired by Japanese retailer Rakuten for $315 million, couldn't have launched its new e-reader at a better time, when e-readers are expected to be a big hit during this holiday shopping season. Kobo Touch with Offers will start shipping in two to three weeks.

Meanwhile, Kobo's device directly competes with Amazon's Kindle Touch with Special Offers and Barnes and Noble's Nook Simple Touch as all three have a 6-inch screen and come with $99 price point. Kindle Touch with Special Offers is due to ship on Nov. 21.

Let's see how these three e-readers fare against each other:

Specs

Kobo Touch With Offers

Kindle Touch With Special Offers

Nook Simple Touch

Ads

Yes

Yes

No

Display

6-inch Pearl high contrast E Ink display

 6-inch 600 x 800 pixel resolution at 167 ppi, 16-level grayscale

 6-inch E Ink display  800x600 resolution

Size

114x 165x 10 mm

172x 120 x 10.1 mm

165.1x 127x 11.9 mm

Weight

About 185 grams

213 grams

212 grams

Storage

2GB internal memory; expandable up to 32GB via SD card

4GB internal storage

2GB internal storage; expandable up to 32GB via SD card

Battery Life

Up to 1 month

Up to two months with wireless off

More than 2 months with wireless off

Connectivity

USB, Wi-Fi

USB, Wi-Fi

USB, Wi-Fi

Supported File Formats

Books: EPUB, PDF and MOBI

Documents: PDF

Images: JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP and TIFF

Text: TXT, HTML and RTF

Comic Books: CBZ and CBR

Kindle (AZW), TXT, PDF, Audible (Audible Enhanced(AA,AAX)), MP3, unprotected MOBI, PRC natively; HTML, DOC, DOCX, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP through conversion

ePub5, PDF, JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP

Content Selection

Over 2.2 million books

Over 1 million books, newspapers, and magazines

Over 2.5 million titles