The Color of Kindle
Well, this is one way to announce your new products... As Thomas Ricker relays:
Amazon just announced four new Kindle e-readers. The Colorsoft Signature Edition is the first color Kindle, there’s a new Kindle Scribe note-taker, a faster version of its most popular Paperwhite, and a new entry-level Kindle.
The Spanish-language announcement with US pricing seems accidental as none of the links to the Amazon store currently work.
Still, this wasn't a huge surprise given that half of these Kindles announced-ish today were also previously leaked in recent weeks! Unclear if Amazon is going with a Google-like let-everything-leak strategy or if this is just a series of blunders. Regardless, the actual big news only leaked by their own mistake with this early release...
The Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition is “designed to offer a rich and paper-like color” for book covers and highlighted text. Images can be zoomed in “without worrying about pixelation” with both standard and vibrant color styles. It’s waterproof and features fast page turns, wireless charging, up to 8 weeks of battery, and new light guide with nitride LEDs. It’ll cost $279.99 and ship on October 30th.
A color Kindle! At last. Again, it was fairly obvious that Amazon was going to make a move here given that most of their main competition already had. And it's not clear what technology they're using to make it work, or how well it actually works with latency, etc. [update: see below] But it all sounds good on paper. I think I'm less interested in color for images than I am for the ability to have multi-colored highlights.
Given that there's no new Kindle Oasis announced here, the previous high-end of the "regular" Kindle market, presumably 'Colorsoft Signature Edition' – lol, this sounds like car-branding, Amazon – is the new high-end. Though it's a decidedly different form-factor than the Oasis, which was clearly optimized for one-handed use. This is more like a regular Kindle in look and feel.
There is also a new Scribe tablet, which came into the lineup a couple years back.
The new Kindle Scribe is an e-reader and note-taker. The 300ppi screen has new white edges and is designed to feel like paper when writing on it when using Amazon’s Premium Pencil with new soft-tip eraser.
It also offers a “first-of-a-kind book writing experience” in addition to note-taking. Active Canvas lets you add notes directly to the pages of a book and the text flows around them. You’ll also be able to add notes in the side panel soon, which can be hidden later. The integrated notebook is infused with AI to summarize pages into concise points. Notes can also be made readable in preparation for export with a handwritten-style font.
I bought the first Scribe. It was fine. Nothing to write home about and, in fact, I couldn't even be bothered to fully write about it. It was a viable answer to the Remarkable tablets bolstered by the Amazon/Kindle ecosystem, but it was also too large and too expensive versus other Kindles. Oddly, this new version seems even more expensive, at $399 but it does look at bit smaller (this promotional page doesn't list the screen size). And it looks like it comes in at least a couple different color options...
Oh yes, and AI, of course. If it's fast and works well, this could be a legitimate reason to buy a Scribe – presuming the tech can't work on other, less powerful Kindle models (presumably the increased price is about increased specs to run the AI?). Is this Amazon's own AI? Anthropic's?
Back to color, now that it's finally here on the actual Kindle screens, where might Amazon take the line from here? I still like this concept from – checks date – almost seven years ago, a Kindle that was actually paper-like. Not just to write-on like the Scribe, but to use. As in you can roll it up, fold it, etc.
This is the holy grail. Others have been dancing around and dabbling with such tech for years at this point. But if Amazon can do this at mass scale, that will be the Kindle everyone has wanted since the very first Kindle. Call it what you want: Peak Kindle. Kindle Pinnacle. The perfect Kindle.
And assuming we’re closer rather than farther from such a Kindle, it could come at a perfect time. The tech backlash against distraction is in high gear already, but isn’t likely to go away any time soon as we all continue to use our devices more and more. If Amazon is waiting in the wings with a piece of technology that is an antidote…
As I noted in that post, that sounds like the peak Kindle product that Jeff Bezos wanted to build given his previous remarks in shareholder letters and elsewhere. Of course, Jeff Bezos stepped down as CEO of Amazon over three years ago. So...
One more thing: Interesting timing on the color Kindle, coming one day after Apple announces a new iPad mini. Are they form-factor fighting?
Update: Amazon has redirected the links to their Spanish-language announcement page, but here's an archived version.
Update 2: Sure enough, it seems like that Spanish-language site simply jumped the embargo gun. The full stories and information about the devices are now live.
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David Pierce on the e-ink technology questions I asked above:
The Colorsoft is based on E Ink’s Kaleido technology but uses an entirely new display stack for Kindles, all the way back to a newly designed oxide backplane that makes it easier for E Ink panel’s tiny bits of ink to move around quickly. The E Ink world has been working on similar tech for a while, and Amazon thinks it’s the key to making color work well. The Colorsoft has new LED pixels, and a new way of shining light through them individually to enhance colors. It’s also brighter than ever, to help the whole thing feel more vivid. Some of this tech also helped the new Paperwhite turn pages faster and easier, but it was designed to make Colorsoft work.
All that display tech, Keith says, allowed Amazon to introduce color without adding page-turn latency, lowering the device’s resolution, or hurting contrast on the display. “All the things you think about with Kindle — high resolution, long battery life, fast page turns, good fluidity — we weren’t willing to sacrifice those,” Keith says. The goal was to offer a color screen that still looked just as good as the Paperwhite in black and white, and he’s convinced Amazon got there.
Sounds good. Order placed.
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On the topic of the second Scribe device – the screen is apparently the same size (boo), but it looks different as the bezels are now white, with Amazon trying to make the thing actually look more like paper...