Amazon has been updating the large-screened Kindle Scribe tablet more frequently and regularly than it updates its standard e-readers, and today the company is announcing the tablet’s third hardware update in four years. The regular Scribe is also being joined by a lower-end Scribe with less storage and no front light and an upgraded Kindle Scribe Colorsoft model with a color e-ink screen. This makes it only the second Kindle to include a color screen, after last year’s Kindle Colorsoft.
Both the regular Kindle Scribe and the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft are available to order starting today for $500 and $630, respectively. Both of those devices include a Premium Pen accessory and 32GB of internal storage; 64GB of storage is available for an extra $50 for both devices. The cheaper front light-less Scribe is coming sometime next year and will run $430 for a model with a more modest 16GB of storage. (These are all much more expensive than the original Scribe’s $340 launch price, but inflation, tariffs, and shortages are wreaking havoc with all kinds of tech prices for the past few years.)
The Scribe and Scribe Colorsoft both come with an updated front light “with miniaturized LEDs that fit tightly against the display,” narrowing the bezel and improving the uniformity of the lighting. Amazon has also tweaked the friction level of the paper-like texture on the glass display, shrunk the gap between the glass and the actual display panel to make writing on the tablet feel more like writing on paper, and added a quad-core processor and more RAM to speed the tablet up.
Our review of the regular Kindle Colorsoft came away less than impressed, because there was only so much you could do with color on a small-screened e-reader that didn’t support pen input, and because it made monochrome text look a bit worse than it did on the regular Kindle Paperwhite. The new Scribe Colorsoft may have some of the same problems, which are mostly inherent to color e-ink technology as it exists today, but a larger screen will also be better for reading comics and graphic novels, and for reading and marking up full-color documents—there could be more of an upside, even if the technological tradeoffs are similar.
Amazon has still been slower to introduce color to its e-readers than its competitors, like last year’s reMarkable Paper Pro ($579 then, $629 now). The Scribe’s software has also felt a little barebones—the writing tools felt tacked on to the more mature reading experience offered by the Kindle’s operating system—but that’s gradually improving. All the new Scribes support syncing files with Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive (though not Dropbox or other services), and the devices can export notebooks to Microsoft’s OneNote app so that you can pick up where you left off on a PC or Mac.
Other software improvements include a redesigned Home screen, “AI-powered search,” and a new shading tool that can be used to add shading or gradients to drawings and sketches. We’ve asked Amazon whether existing Scribe owners can expect to see any or all of these features added via software updates at some point down the line, and we’ll update if we receive a response.
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