Amazon has suddenly introduced four new Kindle ebook readers at the same time, which it’s never done before. It means that there are new versions of three favourite Kindles and one entirely new one, which comes with a spiffy colour screen.
Behind closed doors in an intimate event at The Shed in Hudson Yards, New York, Panos Panay, Senior Vice President of Amazon Devices and Services talked passionately about why the Kindle has become so important in the 17 years since its launch. “Reading has become almost like a sanctuary,” he said, “a place where you find refuge from your phone. When you’re reading, multitasking doesn’t exist because you disappear into that moment.”
He then unveiled Kindle’s all-new range. First came the regular Kindle, now updated in a smart new colour, a pale green Amazon calls Matcha. Like the other readers in the range, this one has a resolution of 300 pixels per inch, for a sharp, easy-to-read look. It’s also brighter than before and a faster processor speeds up page turns – those invasive flashes that used to be typify the ebook reader but which are fast and subtle now.
There was also a new version of the Paperwhite, a premium Kindle at a mid-range price. It has been gently retooled to introduce a larger screen, 7 inches against the 6.8 inches of the previous version, while still feeling comfortable in the hand and redesigned to be thinner, too. This has the fastest page turns of all, 25 per cent quicker than before, for the most immersive experience.
The largest-display Kindle, the Scribe, with its 10.2-inch screen, has also been upgraded with a new design and extra features. The Scribe is meant as much for writing as reading and the new Premium Pen has a hard felt nib that sounds and feels like pencil scribbling on paper. Panay says that the eraser at the other end of the Pen is so realistic that testers found themselves absently brushing the screen as if to clear it of eraser crumbs.
New features include Active Canvas, where you can pick up the pen and scribble on the page as if you would a real book, and the text will reflow around your notes automatically. This and other new features will also come to the original Scribe with a software update.
Finally, and most excitingly, there’s the Kindle Colorsoft, the first Kindle with a colour screen. It’s not the first colour ebook reader, but here the colours are more punchy and vivid, though still tending more to pastel than brightness. It looks great for graphic novels, recipe books and travel guides, for instance. While the resolution of colour images drops to 150ppi, text stays at 300ppi – even when image and text are both on the same page.
I asked Kevin Keith, Vice President of Devices and Services, Kindle, how Amazon’s colour screen differs from rivals. “Everything on Colorsoft is customised, starting with the light guide. We rebuilt the light guide with nitride LEDs. Traditional other devices might have white and amber LEDs, and these are nitrides.
“In addition to the coatings that we put on each layer of the display this allows us to shoot really focused light through the colour pixels instead of washing them out, so you get a much more vivid set of colors with more detail. The nitride LED also increases contrast ratio. and is more battery-efficient. So, we could have a great colour experience and a great black-and-white experience.
“So it’s those two things on the hardware side. On the software side, we also had to do a lot of work with custom algorithms to be able to make the colours show up in a unique way.”
There’s one Kindle that’s being retired, though. When current stocks of the Kindle Oasis are gone, it won’t be available. The Oasis is beautiful, a metal-clad super-slim reader with extra front lights for a smoother read in lower lighting conditions, cute buttons to change pages and a glam design. I ask if the Colorsoft is slotting into the space the Oasis is leaving.
“I see the Oasis as a premium tier and a lot of the things we did with Oasis we were able to move into Paperwhite,” Keith says. “The waterproofing and the flush front display were first on the Oasis. The speed of the page turns and the chips that were in the Oasis all kind of moved down to the Paperwhite and it just kept getting better and better.
“The other thing is we’ve always wanted to bring colour to the Kindle. But the technology had to be ready. And so the oxide back plane and the new light guide meant we were able to bring colour to Kindle for the first time.”
Panay says sales of Kindles are the highest they’ve been for a decade right now, with 60 per cent of sales in 2023 to first-time buyers, and the fastest-growing sector of customers is Gen Z buyers, seeking that sanctuary he mentioned, perhaps.