The new family ofKindles includes the first color one

Active Canvas: an Integrated Notebook for Handwritten Notes in Electronic Documentation and Embedding of Electronic Structure in a Bookshelf

It also offers a “first-of-a-kind book writing experience” in addition to note-taking. You can add notes to the pages of a book through Active Canvas. You’ll also be able to add notes in the side panel soon, which can be hidden later. The integrated notebook is infused with AI to summarize pages into concise points. It is possible to make handwritten notes readable in preparation for export.

Review of the Amazon Paperwhite Launch Event: How a Novel Typewriter Can Turn Your Handwriting into Text or Refine Yours to a Notebook

The Kindle Paperwhite is the “fastest kindle yet,” according to Amazon. The rumored larger 7-inch screen on the best-selling Amazon device could allow it to be thinner than previous generations, while boasting a three month battery life. It’s water resistant with 16GB of storage. Kindle Paperwhite “is now available” from $159.99. The Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition is available for $199.99 with 32GB of storage and optional wireless charging and auto-adjusting front light.

The price is the main reason that the new Scribe doesn’t have a color screen like the new Colorsoft, although I couldn’t say for certain. The Remarkable Paper Pro does color pretty well, but it’s almost $600, and Amazon is far more price-conscious with the Kindle line.)

The announcement with US pricing was accidentally made by the Spanish-language press, since the original Amazon link was diverted after a few hours. It is light on information and no links to the product pages are live, but here is what we know.

We got to try both at Amazon’s launch event in New York City and came away impressed. Both of them are nice devices, but neither is a redefinition of the whole format.

The Scribe can turn your handwriting into text. And once it does so, it can send your notes to one of Amazon’s large language models in order to do one of two things: summarize either a single page or an entire notebook; or automatically “refine” your handwritten notes by translating them into a of handwriting-style fonts and formatting them more cleanly. You will soon be able to search your handwritten notes as well.

“We’ve been intentional with thinking about the metaphor of a notebook,” says Kevin Keith, the VP of product on the Kindle team. We want it to look and feel like a notebook. Amazon continues to see the Kindle as a distraction-free device, free from all the chaos and enticements of your phone and laptop — now it’s trying to apply the same vibes to your writing as it has to your reading.

It took more than just a new display to make the Colorsoft happen, AMAZON executives said at a launch event on Tuesday. Kevin says that technology was not ready before now. “And we now think the tech is ready.” (Kobo, Remarkable, and others might disagree that it wasn’t ready before.)

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. In my demos I show that a pinch to zoom in will give you a smooth zoom, but you have to wait for it to refresh. We’ll have to do a lot more testing, though, and I worry all the screen flashing might get annoying as you navigate through a long graphic novel.

I liked the display of the Colorsoft at the launch event. It’s no iPad screen, but it’s sharp enough and bright enough to make comics pop without being so saturated it looks wrong. It can be a problem if you have a lot of small images on the screen, but when there are a full flashing refresh every time you go to the page, it is the most obvious issue. But those images look good! Again, not really good, but certainly brighter and sharper than some of the E Ink screens we have seen.

The device and services lead at Amazon, who used to run Microsoft’s Surface division, didn’t shy away from showing how popular the products were during a hardware briefing on Tuesday. On Kindle devices, users read an average of 20.8 billion pages per month. Sixty percent of Kindle device sales in 2023 came from first-time customers. Customers are reading more than ever because of the highest sales of Amazon’s device in over a decade. It is almost like, thank goodness because I thought we did not know how to read.