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If you primarily want a tablet for marking up, highlighting, and annotating your e-books and documents, and maybe jotting down a few notes on occasion, Amazon’s new device Kindle Scribe Colorsoft It can be worth the huge investment. For everyone else, it would probably be difficult to justify the $630+ cost of an 11-inch e-ink tablet with a writable color display.
However, if you’re really leaning towards the $549.99 11-inch Kindle Writer — which also has a paper-like screen but no color — you can also throw in the extra money at that point and get Colorsoft versionWhich starts at $629.99.
At these price points, the Scribe and Scribe Colorsoft are what we’d call unnecessary luxuries for most people, especially compared to the more affordable traditional Kindle ($110) or Kindle Paperwhite ($160).
announced in december, Color version fig It just started shipping on January 28, 2026, and is available for $679.99 with 64GB.
Amazon is clearly hoping to carve out a niche in the tablet market with its upgraded Kindle devices, which compete more with e-ink tablets like distinct Than with other kindle. But high-end e-ink readers with pens won’t provide Amazon with a large audience. Meanwhile, almost anyone can justify the cost of an iPad given its many capabilities, including video streaming, drawing, writing, using productivity tools, and thousands of supported native apps and games.
Meanwhile, Scribe Colorsoft is designed to meet the needs of a very specific type of e-book reader or eBook worker. This type of device can be convenient for students and researchers, as well as anyone else who regularly needs to encode files or documents.
Someone particularly interested in making to-do lists or keeping a personal journal might also appreciate the device, but would have to get daily use to justify that price.
The device is easy enough to use, with the home screen layout similar to other Kindle devices, providing quick access to your notes, your library, and even suggestions for books you can write in, like Sudoku, crossword puzzle books, or drawing guides. Your library titles and book recommendations appear in color, making it easy to find a book with a quick scan.
In terms of specs, Amazon says this newer 2025 model is 40% faster when turning pages or typing. We found the tablet responsive here, as the page seemed to turn quickly and writing flowed easily.
Despite its larger size, the device is thin and light, at 5.4 mm (0.21 inches) and 400 grams (0.88 lbs), so it won’t weigh down your bag like an iPad or other tablet does (the iPad mini, with an 8.3-inch screen, weighs slightly less). You can easily carry the Kindle Scribe in your purse or briefcase, assuming you carry a case that can accommodate an 11-inch display. Compared to the original Colorsoft, We like the Scribe Colorsoft bezel to be the same size around the screen.
The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft features a glare-free, oxide-based e-ink display with a textured surface that makes it more like writing on paper. This helps with the transition to a digital device for those who are used to writing notes by hand. It also saves battery life – the device can last up to 8 weeks between charges.
Helpfully, the screen automatically adapts its brightness to your current lighting conditions, and you can choose to set the screen for added warmth when reading at night. But even though it’s a touchscreen, it’s less responsive than an LCD or OLED touchscreen, like the ones found on iPads. This means that when you make a gesture, such as tapping to change the font size, there is some delay.
Like any Kindle device, you can read e-books or PDF files on the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft tablet. You can also import Word documents and other files from Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive directly to your device, or use… Send to Kindle option. (Supported file types include PDF, DOC/DOCX, TXT, RTF, HTM, HTML, PNG, GIF, JPG/JPEG, BMP, and EPUB.) Notebooks on the device can be exported to Microsoft OneNote as well.
The included stylus comes with some trade-offs. Unlike the Apple Pencil, the Kindle’s Premium stylus doesn’t require charging, which is an advantage. It’s also designed to mimic the feel of writing on paper, and it glides fairly well across the screen. Without a flat side to charge, the round stylus doesn’t have the same feel and grip as the Apple Pencil. It’s smoother, so it can slide in your hand.
The Amazon design also requires you to replace the pen tips from time to time, depending on your use, as they can wear out. It is not very expensive to do this – 10 packs It’s about $17 – but there’s something else to keep up with and manage.
There are 10 different pen colors and five highlight colors, so your notes and annotations can be quite colorful.
When writing, you can choose between a pen, fountain pen, marker or pencil in different widths depending on your preference. You can set your favorite pen tool as a shortcut, which is enabled by pressing and holding the side button of the pen. (By default, it’s set to Highlight.) If you grip your pen tightly and accidentally trigger this button, you’ll be happy to know that you can turn this feature off.
The typing experience itself feels natural. Although the e-ink screen means that colors are somewhat muted, which not everyone likes, it works well enough for its purpose. The e-ink tablet isn’t really the best for making digital art, despite the new pens and highlighter, but it’s good for writing, taking notes, and highlighting.
From the Kindle home screen, you can either go straight to writing something through the Quick Notes feature, or you can get even more organized by creating a notebook from the Workspace tab.
The Notebook offers a wide range of notepad templates, allowing you to choose between blank, narrow, medium, or wide-ruled documents, as well as all sorts of other options. There are templates for meeting notes, storyboards, habit trackers, monthly planners, sheet music, graph paper, checklists, daily planners, bullet journals, and more. (New templates with this device include Meeting Notes, Cornell Notes, Legal Pad, and College Rules options.)
It’s fun to be able to erase things by simply flipping the pen over to use the soft-tip eraser, as you would with a No. 2 pencil. Naturally, a precision erase tool is available from the toolbar in different widths, if needed. Thanks to the e-ink screen, you can sometimes still see a faint ghost of drawing or writing on the screen after scanning, but this fades away after a while. (However, it may drive you crazy; more specific types should beware.)
There’s a Lasso tool to select, move, copy, paste, or resize things, but it’s probably not used much by regular bloggers.
There are some other features that are useful for those who do a lot of annotations as well.
For example, when you write in a Word document or book, a feature called Active Canvas creates a space for your notes. When you write directly in the book above the text, the sentence will move and wrap around your note. Even if you adjust the font size of what you read, the note remains linked to the text it originally referred to. I prefer this to writing directly into eBooks as things stay more organized, however Others I disagree.
In documents with expanded margins, you can tap the expandable margin icon above the left or right margin to take your notes in the margin, rather than on the page itself.
A Kindle with AI (of course)
The new Kindle also includes a number of AI tools and features.
The device will organize your scribbles, and will automatically straighten highlighting and underlining. A few times, the highlighting action caused our review unit to freeze, but it recovered after returning to the home screen with a press of the side button.
Meanwhile, a new AI feature (look for the sparkle icon at the top left of the screen) lets you summarize text and improve your handwriting. Oddly enough, the latter doesn’t allow you to switch to a typed font, but it will allow you to choose between a small selection of handwritten fonts (Cadia, Florio, Sunroom, Notewright) via the Customize button.
The AI tool wasn’t perfect. He could decipher some of the terrible scribbles, but he stumbled when there were other scribbles on the page alongside the text. However, this is a good option if you can’t type well after years of typing, but like the feel of handwriting and the analog character it entails.
The AI search feature can also search through your notebooks to find notes or make connections between them. To search, you can either tap the on-screen keyboard or toggle the handwriting option for your search query, which is converted to text. You can interact with search results (AI-powered insights) via the Ask Notebooks AI feature, which allows you to query your notes.
And soon, Amazon will add another AI FeaturesAlso, including an “Ask This Book” feature that lets you highlight a passage and then get spoiler-free answers to your question — like a character’s motivation, the importance of a scene, or other plot details. Another feature, Story So Far, will help you catch up on the book you’re reading if you’ve taken a break, but again without any spoilers.
The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft comes in Graphite (Black) with 32GB or 64GB of storage for $629.99 or $679.99, respectively. The Figure Edition is only available for $679.99 with 64GB of storage. Cases For Scribe Colorsoft it is an additional $139.99.