If you primarily want a tablet device to annotate, highlight and annotate your e-books and documents, and maybe occasionally write some notes, Amazon’s new Kindle Scribe Colorsoft could be worth the big investment. For everyone else, it will probably be hard to justify the cost of the $630+ 11-inch e-ink tablet with a writable color screen.
However, if you were already leaning towards the 11-inch, $549.99 Kindle Scribe — which also has a screen like paper, but no color — you can also drop the extra cash at that point and get the Colorsoft versionwhich starts at $629.99.
At these prices, both the Scribe and the Scribe Colorsoft are what we’d call unnecessary luxuries for most, especially compared to the more affordable traditional Kindle ($110) or Kindle Paperwhite ($160).
Announced in December, the Fig color version It just started shipping on January 28, 2026 and is available for $679.99 with 64GB.
Clearly, Amazon hopes to carve out a niche in the tablet market with these upgraded Kindle devices, which compete more with e-ink tablets like the reMarkable than with other Kindles. But high-end e-ink pen readers aren’t going to give Amazon a large audience. Meanwhile, almost anyone can potentially justify the cost of an iPad because of its numerous capabilities, such as video streaming, drawing, writing, using productivity tools, and the thousands of supported native apps and games.
Scribe Colorsoft, meanwhile, is designed to serve 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 mark up files or documents.
Someone who is particularly interested in making to-do lists or keeping a personal diary might also appreciate the device, but it would have to be used daily to justify that 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 of books you can write in, such as Sudoku or crossword books or drawing guides. Your Library titles and book recommendations are displayed in color, making it easy to find a book with a quick scan.
In terms of specs, Amazon says this newest 2025 model is 40% faster when turning pages or typing. We found the tablet to be responsive here, as page turns were easy and writing flowed easily.
Despite its larger size, the device is thin and light, at 5.4 mm (0.21 in) and 400 g (0.88 lb), so it won’t weigh down your bag like an iPad or other tablet (the iPad mini, with an 8.3-inch screen, weighs slightly less). You could easily afford to carry the Kindle Scribe in your purse or bag, assuming you have 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 non-glare, oxide-based e-ink screen with a textured surface that makes it feel like you’re 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 adjusts its brightness to your current lighting conditions, and you can choose to adjust the screen for more warmth when reading at night. However, even though 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 such as pinching to change the font size, there is a slight delay.
Like any Kindle, you can read eBooks 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 Send to Kindle selection. (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 comes with some exchanges. Unlike the Apple Pencil, the Kindle Premium Pen doesn’t require charging, which is a plus. It’s also designed to mimic the feel of writing on paper and glides quite well across the screen. Without a flat side for charging, the rounded pen doesn’t have the same feel and grip as the Apple Pencil. It’s smoother, so it can slide into your hand.
Amazon’s design also requires you to replace the pen nibs from time to time depending on your usage, as they can wear out. It’s not terribly expensive to do so — a pack of 10 it’s about $17 — but it’s another thing to keep up with and manage it.
10 different pen colors and five highlighter colors are included so your notes and annotations are quite colorful.
When writing, you can choose between a pen, pen, marker or pencil with different stroke widths, depending on your preference. You can set your favorite pen tool as a shortcut, which is activated by pressing and holding the pen’s side button. (By default, it’s set to highlighted.) If you grip your pen tightly and accidentally activate this button, you’ll be happy to know that you can disable this feature.
The writing experience itself is natural. And while the e-ink screen means colors are a bit 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 the pens and new shading tool, but it’s fine for writing, note-taking, and highlighting.
From the Kindle Home screen, you can either jump right into writing something via the Quick Notes feature, or get more organized by creating a Notebook from the Workspace tab.
Notebook offers a wide variety of notebook templates, allowing you to choose between blank, narrow, medium or wide layout documents. There are templates for meeting notes, storyboards, habit trackers, monthly planners, sheet music, graph paper, checklists, daily planners, dotted sheets, and more. (New templates with this device include Meeting Notes, Cornell Notes, Legal Pad, and College Rule.)
It’s fun that you can erase things just by turning the pen over to use the soft-tipped eraser, just like you would with a No. 2 pencil. Of course, a precision eraser tool is available from the toolbar with different widths if needed. Thanks to the e-ink screen, you can sometimes still see a faint ghost of your drawing or writing on the screen after erasing, but that fades after a while (which can drive the more specific types crazy).
There’s a Lasso tool to circle things and move, copy or paste, or resize them, but that probably won’t be used as much by more casual annotators.
There are some other useful features for those who comment a lot.
For example, when you’re writing in a Word document or workbook, a feature called Active Canvas creates space for your notes. As you write directly in the book over 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 referenced. I prefer this to writing directly into e-books as things stay more organized, but others disagree.
In documents where the margins expand, you can tap the expandable margin icon at the top of the left or right margin to keep your notes in the margin, instead of the page itself.
A Kindle with AI (of course)
The new Kindle also includes a number of AI tools and features.
The device will tidy up your scribbles and straighten highlighting and underlining automatically. Sometimes, the highlighting action caused the 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 glow icon at the top left of the screen) lets you summarize text and improve your handwriting. The latter, surprisingly, won’t let you switch to a typed font, but will let you choose from a small handful of handwritten fonts (Cadia, Florio, Sunroom, and Notewright) via the Customize button.
The AI tool wasn’t perfect. He could decipher some terrible scribblings, but was confused when there was another scribble on the page next to the text. Still, it’s a nice option to have if you can’t write well after years of typing, but you like the feel of handwriting and the more analog vibe.
The AI search function can also look through your notebooks to find notes or make connections between them. To search, you either tap the on-screen keyboard or toggle the handwriting option of your search query, which is converted to text. You can interact with the search results (the AI-powered insights) through the Ask Notebooks AI feature, which allows you to ask questions about your notes.
Soon, Amazon will add more AI characteristicsalso including an Ask This Book feature that lets you highlight a passage and then get spoiler-free answers to a question you have — like a character’s motivation, the significance 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 spoilers.
The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft is available in Graphite (Black) with either 32GB or 64GB of storage for $629.99 or $679.99, respectively. The Fig version is only available at $679.99 with 64GB of storage. Cases for Scribe Colorsoft they have an additional $139.99.
