The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft is a pricey but pretty e-ink color tablet with AI features
If your primary desire is for a tablet to mark up, mark up and annotate your ebooks and documents, and perhaps take some notes occasionally, Amazon’s new Kindle Scribe Colorsoft could be worth the hefty investment. For everyone else, it will probably be hard to justify the cost of the 11-inch, $630+ e-ink tablet with a writable color display.
However, if you were already leaning towards the 11-inch $549.99 Kindle Writer – which also has a papery display but no color – at that point you might as well throw in the extra cash and get the Colorsoft versionwhich starts at $629.99.
At these price points, both the Scribe and Scribe Colorsoft are what we’d call unnecessary luxuries for most, especially compared to the more affordable traditional Kindle ($110) or Kindle Paperwhite ($160).
In December it was announced that the Fig color version Shipping just started on January 28, 2026 and it’s available for $679.99 with 64GB.
Clearly, Amazon is hoping to carve out a niche in the tablet market with these upgraded Kindle devices, which compete more with e-ink tablets like reMarkable than with other Kindles. But high-end e-ink readers with pens won’t win Amazon a large audience. Meanwhile, almost anyone can potentially justify the cost of an iPad due to its myriad capabilities, including streaming video, drawing, writing, using productivity tools, and the thousands of native apps and games supported.
The Scribe Colorsoft, meanwhile, is designed to cater to a very specific type of ebook reader or worker. This type of device could be well suited for students and researchers, as well as anyone who regularly needs to mark up files or documents.
Someone who is primarily interested in making to-do lists or keeping a personal diary might also appreciate the device, but it would need to get daily use to justify this price.
The device is easy to use, with a home screen design similar to other Kindles, and offers quick access to your notes and library, and even suggestions for books to write in, such as Sudoku or crossword puzzle books or drawing guides. Your library titles and book recommendations appear in color, making it easier to find a book with a quick scan.
As for specs, Amazon says this newer 2025 model is 40% faster when turning pages or writing. We found the tablet responsive here, as turning pages felt snappy and writing was easy.
Despite its larger size, the device is thin and light, weighing 5.4mm (0.21 inches) and 400g (0.88 pounds), so it won’t weigh down your bag as much as an iPad or other tablet (the iPad mini, with an 8.3-inch screen, weighs slightly less). You could easily carry the Kindle Scribe in your purse or bag, assuming you’re carrying a bag that can fit an 11-inch screen. Compared to the original Colorsoft, we like that the edge of the Scribe Colorsoft around the screen is the same size.
The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft features a glare-free, oxide-based e-ink screen with a textured surface that makes it look like you’re writing on paper. This helps with the transition to a digital device for those who are used to taking notes by hand. It also saves battery life: the device can last up to 8 weeks between charges.
Conveniently, the screen automatically adjusts brightness to your current lighting conditions, and you can choose to adjust the screen for more warmth when reading at night. But even though it’s a touchscreen, it’s less responsive than an LCD or OLED touchscreen, like those on iPad devices. That means when you perform a gesture such as pinching to adjust the font size, there will be a bit of a delay.
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 the 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 some disadvantages. Unlike the Apple Pencil, the Kindle’s Premium Pen doesn’t require charging, which is a plus. It’s also designed to mimic the feel of writing on paper, and it glides across the screen quite well. Without a flat side for charging, the round pen doesn’t have the same feel and grip as the Apple Pencil. It is smoother so it can slide in your hand.
Amazon’s design also requires you to replace the nibs from time to time depending on your usage as they can wear out. It is not very expensive to do this – a 10 pack costs about $17, but it’s something else to track 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, a fountain pen, a marker or a pencil with different line widths, depending on your preferences. 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’re holding your pen tightly and accidentally activate this button, you’ll be happy to know that you can disable this feature.
The writing experience itself feels natural. And while the e-ink display does make the colors slightly muted, which not everyone will like, 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 is good for writing, note-taking, and highlighting.
From the Kindle home screen, you can write something down right away using the Quick Notes feature, or you can get more organized by creating a notebook from the Workspace tab.
The Notebook offers a wide variety of notebook templates, so you can 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 templates with this device include Meeting Notes, Cornell Notes, Legal Pad, and College Rule options.)
It’s nice that you can erase things by turning the pen over and using the soft-tip eraser, as you would with the No. 2 pencil. Of course, there’s a precision erase tool available on 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 this fades after a while (which can drive the more specific types crazy).
There’s a Lasso tool to circle and move things, copy or paste, or resize things, but this probably won’t be used as much by more casual note-takers.
There are also some other useful 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 on top of 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 anchored to the text it originally referred to. I prefer writing directly into ebooks because it keeps things more organized, but others disagree.
In documents where margins expand, you can tap the expandable 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 neatens your scribbles and automatically straightens your highlights and underlines. A few times the highlight action caused our review device 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 both summarize text and refine your handwriting. The latter, oddly enough, doesn’t let you switch to a typed font, but allows you to choose between a small handful of handwritten fonts (Cadia, Florio, Sunroom and Notewright) via the Customize button.
The AI tool wasn’t perfect. It was able to decipher some terrible scribbles, but it ran into trouble 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 things and the more analog vibe.
The AI search can also look through your notebooks to find notes or make connections between them. To search, tap the onscreen keyboard or enable the option to handwrite your search, which will be converted to text. You can interact with the search results (the AI-powered insights) through the Ask Notebooks AI feature, which lets you search your notes.
Amazon will soon add other AI functionsincluding an ‘Ask This Book’ feature that lets you highlight a passage and then get spoiler-free answers to a question you have, such as a character’s motive, the meaning of the scene, or other plot details. Another section, ‘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 comes in Graphite (Black) with 32GB or 64GB of storage for $629.99 or $679.99 respectively. The Fig version is only available for $679.99 with 64 GB of storage. Fallen for the Scribe Colorsoft costs an additional $139.99.
