If you primarily want a tablet device to annotate, highlight, and annotate your e-books and documents, and maybe scribble some notes of your own now and then, Amazon’s new Kindle Scribe Colorsoft could be a hefty investment. Everyone else will likely find it hard to justify the cost of an 11-inch, $630-plus e-ink tablet with a writable color display.
However, if you’ve already been leaning toward the $549.99 11-inch Kindle Scribe — which also has a paper display but no color — you might as well throw in the extra cash at that point and get the Colorsoft version instead, which starts at $629.99.
At these price points, both the Scribe and the Scribe Colorsoft are what we’d mostly call unnecessary luxuries, especially compared to the more affordable traditional Kindle ($110) or Kindle Paperwhite ($160).
Announced in December, the color version of the Fig just started shipping on January 28, 2026 and is available for $679.99 in 64GB.
Clearly, Amazon is hoping to carve out a niche in the tablet market with these upgraded Kindle devices, competing more with e-ink tablets like the reMarkable than other Kindles. However, Amazon won’t deliver high-end electronic ink pen readers to a large audience. Meanwhile, almost anyone can potentially justify the cost of an iPad because of its many features, including video streaming, drawing, typing, using productivity tools, and thousands of supported native apps and games.
Scribe Colorsoft, meanwhile, is designed to suit a very specific type of e-book reader or worker. Students and researchers, as well as anyone else who regularly needs to tag files or documents, could benefit from this type of device.
Someone with a particular interest in creating to-do lists or keeping a personal journal might also appreciate the device, but it would have to be used daily to justify the price.
The device itself is easy to use, with a home screen design similar to other Kindles that offers quick access to your notes and library, and even suggestions for books to write in, such as sudoku or crossword books or drawing guides. Your library names and book recommendations will be colored, making it easy to find a book with a quick scan.
In terms of specs, Amazon says this newer 2025 model is 40% faster when turning pages or typing. We found the tablet responsive here, as page turning was brisk and typing 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 8.3-inch iPad mini weighs slightly less). You can easily carry the Kindle Scribe in your purse or bag, provided you have a bag that can fit the 11-inch screen. Compared to the original Colorsoft, we like that the Scribe Colorsoft bezel is the same size around the screen.
The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft features an anti-glare oxide-based e-ink display with a textured surface that feels like you’re writing on paper. This helps with the transition to digital devices for those who use handwritten notes. It also saves battery life – the device can last up to 8 weeks between charges.
Helpfully, the display automatically adjusts its brightness to your current lighting conditions, and you can choose to adjust the screen for more warmth when reading at night. But while it’s a touchscreen, it’s less sensitive than an LCD or OLED touchscreen like the ones on iPad devices. This means that when you perform a gesture like pinch to change the font size, there is some delay.
Like any Kindle, you can read e-books or PDF files 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 device notebooks can also be exported to Microsoft OneNote.
The included pen comes with some compromises. Unlike the Apple Pencil, the premium Kindle pen does not require charging, which is an advantage. It has also been designed to mimic the feel of writing on paper, and it glides quite well across the screen. Without a flat charging side, the rounded pen doesn’t have the same feel and grip as the Apple Pencil. It’s smoother so it could 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’s not terribly expensive—a 10-pack costs around $17—but it’s one more thing to keep up with and manage.
It includes 10 different pen colors and five highlight colors, so your notes and annotations can be quite colorful.
When writing, you can choose between a pen, fountain pen, marker or pencil with different stroke widths according to your preferences. You can set your favorite pen tool as a shortcut that is activated by pressing and holding the pen’s side button. (It’s set to highlight by default.) If you grip your pen tightly and accidentally press this button, you’ll be glad you can turn this feature off.
The writing experience itself feels natural. And while the e-ink display means colors are somewhat muted, which not everyone likes, it works well enough for its purpose. The e-ink tablet isn’t really the best for creating digital art, despite its pens and new shader tool, but it’s good for typing, note-taking, and highlighting.
From the Kindle home screen, you can either jump right into writing something using the Quick Notes feature, or you can get better organization by creating a notebook in the Desktop tab.
The notebook offers a wide variety of notebook templates that let you choose between blank, narrow, medium, or wide documents, as well as all kinds of other options. There are templates for meeting notes, scripts, habit trackers, monthly planners, sheet music, graph paper, checklists, daily planners, bulleted 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 by just turning the pen and using a soft-tipped eraser like you would a #2 pencil. Of course, there’s a precision eraser tool with different widths from the toolbar if needed. Thanks to the e-ink screen, sometimes after erasing, you can still see a faint ghost of your drawing or writing on the screen, but it disappears after a while. (It can drive you crazy though, more specific types we should warn.)
There’s a Lasso tool that you can use to circle and move things around, copy or paste or resize, but it probably won’t be of much use to casual scribblers.
There are a few other useful features for those who take a lot of notes.
For example, when you’re writing in a Word document or book, a feature called Active Canvas creates space for your notes. When you write directly into the book above the text, the sentence will move 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 to write it directly in ebooks because 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 make notes in the margin instead of on the page itself.
Kindle with AI (obviously)
The new Kindle also includes a number of AI tools and features.
The device will correct your scribbles and automatically straighten your highlights and underlines. The highlight action caused our review unit to freeze a few times, but after returning to the home screen by pressing the side button, it recovered.
Meanwhile, a new AI feature (look for the spark icon at the top left of the screen) lets you summarize text and refine your handwriting. The latter oddly doesn’t let you switch to a typeface, but lets you choose from a small handful of handwritten fonts (Cadia, Florio, Sunroom, and Notewright) using the Customize button.
The AI tool was not perfect. It was able to decipher some of the horrible scribbles, but it got stuck when there was more scribbles on the page next to the text. Still, it’s a nice option if you can’t type well after years of typing on a keyboard, but like the feel of handwritten things and the more analog feel that comes with it.
AI search can also browse your notebooks to find notes or make connections between them. To search, tap the on-screen keyboard or toggle the option to manually type a search query that will be converted to text. You can interact with the search results (statistics powered by artificial intelligence) using the Ask Notebooks AI feature, which allows you to query your notes.
Amazon will soon add more 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, the meaning of a scene, or other plot details. Another feature, “The Story So Far” helps you catch up on the book you’re currently reading if you’ve taken a break, but again without any spoilers.
The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft comes in Graphite (Black) with 32GB or 64GB of storage for $629.99 and $679.99, respectively. The Fig version is only available for $679.99 with 64GB of storage. Scribe Colorsoft cases are an additional $139.99.