If you mainly want a tablet to annotate, highlight, and annotate your e-books and documents, and maybe occasionally scribble a few notes, Amazon’s new product Kindle Scribe Colorsoft it might be worth the heavy investment. For anyone else, it will probably be difficult to justify the cost of the 11-inch e-ink tablet, worth more than $630, with a writable color screen.
However, if you were already leaning towards the 11-inch at $549.99 Kindle Scribe – which also has a paper-like display but no color – you might as well add some extra money at this point and get the Colorsoft versionwhich starts at $629.99.
At these price points, the Scribe and Scribe Colorsoft are what we would call an unnecessary luxury for most, especially compared to the more affordable traditional Kindle ($110) or the Kindle Paperwhite ($160).
Announced in December, the Fig color version Shipping just started on January 28, 2026 and is available for $679.99 with 64GB.
Clearly, Amazon is hoping to carve out a niche in the tablet market with these improved Kindle devices, which further compete with e-ink tablets like outstanding than with other Kindles. But high-end e-ink readers with stylus won’t allow Amazon to reach a large audience. Meanwhile, almost everyone can potentially justify the cost of an iPad because of its many features, including video streaming, drawing, writing, using productivity tools, and the thousands of supported native apps and games.
The Colorsoft Scribe, on the other hand, is designed to cater to a very specific type of e-book reader or worker. This type of device could be suitable for students and researchers, as well as anyone else who regularly needs to annotate files or documents.
Someone particularly interested in creating to-do lists or keeping a personal journal might also enjoy the device, but it would need to be used daily to justify this price.
The device is quite easy to use, with a home screen design similar to other Kindles, offering quick access to your notes and library, and even suggestions for books you can write in, like Sudoku books, crosswords, 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 claims this new 2025 model is 40% faster at turning pages or writing. We found the tablet responsive here, as pages turn quickly and writing flows smoothly.
Despite its larger size, the device is thin and light, at 5.4 mm (0.21 inches) and 400 g (0.88 pounds), so it won’t weigh down your bag like an iPad or other tablet would (the iPad mini, with an 8.3-inch screen, weighs slightly less). You can easily carry the Kindle Scribe in your purse or tote, as long as you carry a bag that can fit an 11-inch screen. Compared to the original Colorsoft, We like that the Scribe Colorsoft’s bezel is the same size around the screen.
The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft features a glare-free oxide e-ink display with a textured surface that feels like writing on paper. This makes the transition to a digital device easier for those who are used to writing notes by hand. This 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 adjust the screen for extra warmth when reading at night. But although it’s a touchscreen, it’s less responsive than an LCD or OLED touchscreen, like those on iPad devices. This means that when you perform a gesture, like pinching to resize the font, there is a slight lag.
Like any Kindle, you can read e-books or PDFs 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 the tool Send to Kindle option. (Supported file types include PDF, DOC/DOCX, TXT, RTF, HTM, HTML, PNG, GIF, JPG/JPEG, BMP, and EPUB.) Your notebooks on the device can also be exported to Microsoft OneNote.
The included pen has a few compromises. Unlike the Apple Pencil, the Kindle’s Premium Stylus doesn’t require charging, which is a plus. It was also designed to mimic the feeling of writing on paper and glides across the screen quite well. Without a flat side for charging, the rounded stylus doesn’t have the same feel and grip as the Apple Pencil. It’s smoother, so it might slip in your hand.
Amazon’s design also requires you to replace the pen tips from time to time, depending on your usage, as they can wear out. It’s not very expensive to do it… a pack of 10 costs about $17 – but that’s another thing to keep track of and manage.
There are 10 different pen colors and five highlight colors included, so your notes and annotations can be quite colorful.
When writing, you can choose between a pen, fountain pen, marker or pencil with different line widths, depending on your preferences. You can set your favorite pen tool as a shortcut, which is activated by long-pressing the pen side button. (By default, it’s highlighted.) 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 writing experience itself feels natural. And while the e-ink screen means colors are somewhat muted, which not everyone likes, it works well enough for its purpose. An e-ink tablet isn’t really the best for creating digital art, despite its styluses and new shader tool, but it’s great for writing, taking notes, and highlighting.
From the Kindle home screen, you can either jump straight to writing something via the Quick Notes feature, or get more organized by creating a notebook from the Workspace tab.
Notepad offers a wide variety of notepad templates, allowing you to choose between blank, narrow, medium, or wide documents. There are templates for meeting notes, storyboards, habit trackers, monthly planners, music sheets, graph paper, checklists, daily planners, dotted sheets and much more. (New models with this device include Meeting Notes, Cornell Notes, Legal Notepad, and College Rules options.)
It’s fun to be able to erase things just by flipping the pen over to use the soft-tipped eraser, just like you would with a #2 pencil. Of course, a precision erase tool is available in the toolbar with different widths, if necessary. Thanks to the e-ink screen, you can sometimes still see a slight ghosting of your drawing or writing on the screen after erasing, but this fades after a while (which can drive more particular types crazy).
There is a Lasso tool for circling items and moving, copying, pasting, or resizing them, but it probably won’t be used as much by more casual note-takers.
There are also other handy features for those who annotate a lot.
For example, when you write in a Word document or book, a feature called Active Canvas creates space for your notes. As 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’re reading, the note remains anchored to the text it originally referred to. I prefer this over writing directly in eBooks because it keeps things more organized, but others disagree.
In documents where the margins expand, you can tap the expanding margin icon at the top of the left or right margin to make 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 clean up your scribbles and automatically straighten your highlighting and underlining. On several occasions, the highlighting action caused our review unit to freeze, but it recovered after returning to the home screen by pressing the side button.
Meanwhile, a new AI feature (look for the sparkling icon at the top left of the screen) lets you both summarize text and refine your writing. The latter, oddly enough, doesn’t let you switch to a typewritten font but will allow you to choose between a small handful of handwritten fonts (Cadia, Florio, Sunroom and Notewright) via the Customize button.
The AI tool was not perfect. He could decipher terrible scribbles, but he was perplexed when there was another scribble on the page next to the text. Still, it’s a nice option if you can’t write well after years of typing, but like the feel of handwriting and the more analog vibe.
The AI search feature can also search through your notebooks to find notes or make connections between them. To search, you either tap the on-screen keyboard or the option to manually write your search query, which is converted to text. You can interact with search results (the AI-powered insights) through the Ask Notebooks AI feature, which lets you query your notes.
Soon, Amazon will add more AI featuresalso including a “Request This Book” feature that lets you highlight a passage and then get spoiler-free answers to a question you have – like a character’s motive, the meaning of the scene, or any other plot detail. 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 spoilers.
The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft is available in graphite (black) with 32 GB or 64 GB of storage for $629.99 or $679.99, respectively. The Fig version is only available at $679.99 with 64GB of storage. Case for the Scribe Colorsoft costs an additional $139.99.
