Active Canvas, the New Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition and the Unusual Way Amazon Uses the Largest E-reader, the Scribe

It also has a book writing experience in addition to note-taking. Active Canvas lets you add notes directly to the pages of a book and the text flows around them. You’ll also be able to add notes in the side panel soon, which can be hidden later. The integrated notebook uses artificial intelligence to summarize the pages. Notes can also be made readable in preparation for export with a handwritten-style font.

Users of the e-readers have wanted a color version of the device from Amazon. Now, the company is finally delivering: it’s launching the new Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition, a device that has a lot in common with the new Paperwhite, except instead of black and white it’s color all over. The Colorsoft costs $279.99 and is available for preorder today, with shipments starting October 30th.

Ever since Amazon launched the Kindle Scribe in 2022, the company has been noticing some unusual ways people are using the device. Scribe users read more nonfiction than normal Kindle owners; a full 60 percent of Scribe buyers use the device at work. That’s maybe not shocking, given that the Scribe is the largest Kindle and the one with an included stylus for taking notes.

The Amazon Kindle as a Notebook in your Hand: A Preliminary Report on the U.S. Amazon Pricing Announcement

The Spanish-language announcement with US pricing was accidental as the original amazon link was redirected after a few hours (here’s an archive). There are no live links to the product pages but here is what we know so far.

We tried both at the launch event for Amazon in New York City. Both are nice devices, but neither is a remake of the whole format.

The other thing the Scribe can do now is convert your handwriting into text. Once it does so, it can send your notes to one of Amazon’s large language models which will either summarize a single page or an entire notebook, or if you prefer, it can translate handwritten notes into handwriting style. Eventually you’ll also be able to search your handwritten notes, too.

“We’ve been intentional with thinking about the metaphor of a notebook,” says Kevin Keith, the VP of product on the Kindle team. It should feel like a notebook in your hand. Amazon is now trying to apply the same vibes to your writing as it does to your reading, since they see the ebook as distraction-free and free from all the temptations of your phone and laptop.

The biggest upside of a color screen so far is just that it makes the whole interface a little nicer. It makes your homescreen and library better to browse, now that you can see your book covers in full color. It’s also a big win on the lockscreen, which now presents a much more vibrant standby screen while it’s on your bedside table. A lot of BookTok people will love the color screen, seems to be the opinion of a person namedKeith. You can add highlights in multiple colors and then look them up later on in the eBooki app in your phone, but it’s only color-specific.

Best of all, pages turn fast and books open quickly — if this thing is meaningfully slower than the new Paperwhite, I didn’t really notice. On a regular book, the 300ppi screen looks about as good as the other Kindles, too. You can pinch to zoom on most images, and in my demos the image will zoom smoothly but pixelate until it refreshes a moment later. We have to do a lot more testing and I think screen flashing might annoy you as you navigate through a lengthy graphic novel.

At the launch event for Amazon, I was impressed with the Colorsoft display. The sharp and bright screen makes comics pop without being so saturated that it looks wrong. When there is a color image on the page, the device does a full flashing refresh every time you turn it on, but it only happens when there is a sufficiently large image on the screen, but it happened to me even with some pretty tiny images. Those images are very good. Again, not iPad-level good, but certainly sharper and brighter than some color E Ink screens we’ve seen on devices like the Kobo Clara Colour.

The device and services lead at Amazon, who used to run Microsoft’s Surface division, bragged about how popular his Kindles had become during a hardware briefing on Tuesday. Users on the Amazon device read an average of 20.8 billion pages a month. The majority of sales of the product came from first-time customers. Customers are reading more than ever, as a result of the highest sales of Kindle in over a decade. I thought we didn’t know how to read.