If you primarily want a tablet device to mark up, highlight, and annotate your e-books and documents, and perhaps sometimes scribble some notes, Amazon’s new Kindle Scribe Colorsoft could be worth the hefty investment. For everyone else, it’s probably going to be hard to justify the cost of the 11-inch, $630+ e-ink tablet with a writeable color display.
However, if you were already leaning toward the 11-inch $549.99 Kindle Scribe — which also has a paper-like display but no color — you may as well throw in the extra cash at that point and get the Colorsoft version, which starts at $629.99.
At these price points, both the Scribe and Scribe Colorsoft are what we’d dub unnecessary luxuries for most, especially compared with the more affordable traditional Kindle ($110) or Kindle Paperwhite ($160).
Announced in December, the Fig color version just began 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 reMarkable than with other Kindles. But high-end e-ink readers with pens aren’t going to deliver Amazon a large audience. Meanwhile, nearly everyone can potentially justify the cost of an iPad because of its numerous capabilities, including streaming video, drawing, writing, using productivity tools, and the thousands of supported native apps and games.
The Scribe Colorsoft, meanwhile, is designed to cater to a very specific type of e-book reader or worker. This type of device could be a good fit for students and researchers, as well as anyone else who regularly needs to mark up files or documents.
Someone particularly interested in making to-do lists or keeping a personal journal might also appreciate the device, but it would have to get daily use to justify this price.
The device is easy enough 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, like Sudoku or crossword puzzle books or drawing guides. Your Library titles and book recommendations pop in color, which makes it easier to find a book with a quick scan.
Spec-wise, Amazon says this newer 2025 model is 40% faster when turning pages or writing. We did find the tablet responsive here, as page turns felt snappy and writing flowed easily.
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 the way an iPad or other tablet would (the iPad mini, with an 8.3-inch screen, weighs slightly less). You could easily stand to carry the Kindle Scribe in your purse or tote, assuming you sport a bag that can fit an 11-inch screen. Compared with 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-based e-ink display with a textured surface that makes it feel a lot like writing on paper. This helps with the transition to a digital device for those used to writing notes by hand. It also saves on battery life — the device can go up to 8 weeks between charges.
Helpfully, the display automatically adapts its brightness to your current lighting conditions, and you can opt to adjust the screen for more warmth when reading at night. But although it is a touchscreen, it’s less responsive than an LCD or OLED touchscreen, like those on iPad devices. That means when you perform a gesture, like pinching to resize the font, there’s a bit of a 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 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 be exported to Microsoft OneNote, as well.
The included pen comes with some trade-offs. Unlike the Apple Pencil, the Kindle’s Premium Pen doesn’t require charging, which is a perk. It has also been designed to mimic the feel of writing on paper, and it glides fairly well across the screen. Without a flat side to charge, the rounded pen doesn’t have the same feel and grip as the Apple Pencil. It’s smoother, so it could slip in your hand.
Amazon’s design also requires you to replace the pen tips from time to time, depending on your use, as they can wear down. It’s not terribly expensive to do so — a 10 pack is around $17 — but it’s another thing to keep up with and manage.
There are 10 different pen colors and five highlight colors included, so your notes and annotations can be fairly colorful.
When writing, you can choose between a pen, a fountain pen, a marker, or a pencil with different stroke widths, depending on your preferences. You can set your favorite pen tool as a shortcut, which is enabled with a press and hold on the pen’s side button. (By default, it’s set to highlight.) If you grip your pen tightly and accidentally trigger this button, you’ll be glad to know you can shut this feature off.
The writing experience itself feels natural. And while the e-ink display means the 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 making digital art, despite its pens and new shader tool, but it is good for writing, taking notes, and highlighting.
From the Kindle’s Home screen, you can either jump directly into writing something down through 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 notepad templates, allowing you to choose between blank, narrow, medium, or wide-ruled 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 fun that you can erase things just by flipping the pen over to use the soft-tipped eraser, as you would with a No. 2 pencil. Of course, a precision erasing 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 this fades after a bit (which may drive the more particular types crazy).
There’s a Lasso tool to circle things and move them around, copy or paste, or resize, but this probably won’t be used as much by more casual notetakers.
There are some other handy features for those who do a lot of annotating, too.
For instance, when you’re writing 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’re reading, the note stays anchored to the text it originally referenced. I prefer this to writing directly in e-books, as things stay 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 take your notes in the margin, instead of 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 neaten up your scribbles and automatically straighten your highlighting and underlining. A couple of times, the highlighting action caused our review unit 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, doesn’t let you switch to a typed font but will let you pick between a small handful of handwritten fonts (Cadia, Florio, Sunroom, and Notewright) via the Customize button.
The AI tool was not perfect. It could decipher some terrible scrawls, but it did get stumped when there was another scribble on the page alongside the text. Still, it’s a nice option to have 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 feature can also look across your notebooks to find notes or make connections between them. To search, you either tap the on-screen keyboard or toggle the option to handwrite your search query, which is converted to text. You can interact with the search results (the AI-powered insights) by way of the Ask Notebooks AI feature, which lets you query against your notes.
Soon, Amazon will add other AI features, too, 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 motive, scene significance, or 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 any spoilers.
The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft comes 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 the Scribe Colorsoft are an additional $139.99.
