So I finally did it. Sat on the couch last night, half-watching some show I wasn't really watching, and preordered the Kindle Colorsoft. $279.99. That's a genuinely absurd amount of money for an e-reader, and I want to be clear that I know that, and I did it anyway.
For anyone who missed it, Amazon rolled out a refreshed Kindle lineup a little over a week ago: new Paperwhite, an updated Scribe, and the Colorsoft, which is the first Kindle with an actual color screen. Not a color LCD like an iPad, a color E Ink panel, which is a different thing entirely and the reason I care. It's supposed to ship around October 30th. We'll see. Amazon ship dates on brand-new hardware categories have a way of sliding.
I've owned, at minimum count, five Kindles since 2011. The og Kindle Keyboard was my first one, the one with the actual physical keyboard under the screen that nobody used for anything except entering wifi passwords. I still have it in a drawer somewhere, dead battery, screen probably fine because E Ink doesn't really degrade the way LCDs do. Then a Paperwhite, then another Paperwhite because I dropped the first one in a bathtub (dont ask), then an Oasis I regretted buying because the page-turn buttons were a gimmick I used twice, and now whatever this is going to be.
Here's my actual opinion, since I promised myself Id stop writing posts that are just "here's a thing that exists": color E Ink has been "almost here" for like eight years. I remember reading about Kaleido and Advanced Color E Paper panels back when this blog was still mostly me complaining about Windows Phone, and every time the pitch was the same: muted colors, kind of washed out compared to print, but a huge step for readers who want to see book covers or comics or textbook diagrams without staring into a backlit screen at 11pm wrecking their sleep. And every single demo photo I've ever seen of these panels looks a little duller than promised. I fully expect the Colorsoft to look "fine, kind of yellow-green in certain lighting" rather than "wow." I'm preordering it anyway because I am, apparently, a sucker for incremental e-ink progress in a way I am absolutely not a sucker for the fortieth iteration of a phone camera bump.
The price bugs me more than I want to admit. The regular Paperwhite is $159.99. Adding color tacks on $120, which is more than the base Kindle costs on its own. I get that new panel tech is expensive to manufacture at first (fine, sure) but it does mean this thing is priced for people who already know they want it, not people trying it out. Which, fair, I guess that's me.
What I'm actually hoping for isn't the color itself, honestly. It's better highlighting. Right now if you highlight a passage on a regular Kindle it just gets a gray underline, which is functional but forgettable, and I read a lot of nonfiction where I go back through highlights months later trying to remember why I flagged a paragraph. Being able to color-code highlights — yellow for "good quote," say, versus something else for "check this citation" — is a small thing but it's the kind of small thing that changes how you actually use a device day to day. Nobody in the marketing copy talks about that. They talk about "vivid graphic novels" and comic book covers, which, fine, but I don't read comics on my Kindle and never will, the screen's too small and the refresh rate is too slow for anything with panel-to-panel motion.
Anyway. It's ordered. Ill report back once it actually ships, assuming Amazon hits the date, which is not a given with any first-generation hardware category. If the color turns out to be as washed-out as I expect, I reserve the right to complain about it at length. If it's better than expected I'll say that too. That's the deal with this blog, it's been the deal since 2011: I buy the thing, I tell you if it was worth it.
One more thing before I go: if you're in western North Carolina right now dealing with the aftermath of Helene, none of this matters, obviously, and I hope you and your people are okay. Feels weird writing about a $280 reading gadget in the same week as that, but here we are, this is still a blog about gadgets, so.