The new color Kindle XL is probably the most we can ask for from an e-reader

When Amazon introduced the first Kindle Scribe in 2022, many interpreted it as a response to ReMarkable. After all, it was hard to think otherwise: a large screen, a stylus, and the ability to write and take notes. It seemed inevitable to read that product as Amazon’s move to enter the digital notebook market.

Four years later, however, the new Kindle Scribe Colorsoft suggests a different perspective. It is not a notebook that can read books. It is a Kindle that has learned to be annotated. It may seem like a subtle distinction, but it is fundamental to understanding why the new color model is probably the definitive digital book reader.

For years, ReMarkable represented the most convincing attempt to transform a blank sheet of paper into a digital object. The notebook has always been at the center of the experience: books and documents came later, almost as natural extensions of that original mission. From then on, a cascade of devices from more or less established tech brands followed, attempting to replace traditional notebooks.

Using Kindle Scribe, one notices an entirely opposite logic. Its starting point is not writing, but reading. The book remains the absolute protagonist, while the notebook becomes a complementary tool.

The difference emerges with particular clarity in the new Colorsoft. At first glance, the most obvious element is naturally the color. In reality, after a few days of use, one discovers that color is interesting primarily for what it allows you to do, rather than what it shows.

Reading a novel in color changes very little. Studying a text, however, and using colors to highlight, annotate, and mark passages, changes everything.

One of the most surprising qualities of the new device is how Amazon designed the interaction with books. Highlights straighten themselves automatically. Marginal notes are quick to insert. Sticky notes feel natural and immediate. The stylus integrates a shortcut button that speeds up many operations. Individually, these are details. Together, they build the rare sensation of a system designed to work on texts.

To this idea of active reading, the inevitable layer of artificial intelligence is also added. The new Kindle Scribe lineup introduces tools to search through notebooks, generate summaries, and suggest deep-dive questions: features that might seem like yet another attempt to add AI everywhere, but here they find a precise justification.

In a device designed for studying, the challenge is not just taking notes, but retrieving them, connecting them, and making them resurface when needed. Finally leveraging the potential of digital texts beyond the fact that they weigh less than a paper book and are faster to buy.

If the classic Kindle was the place to read, the new Scribe also tries to become the place to rediscover your own thoughts on books.

Color finds its most convincing justification here as well. It doesn’t serve so much to make covers look prettier or to read comic books — which admittedly look particularly pleasant on the large 11-inch screen — as it does to construct a mental hierarchy within the text. 

One color for key concepts, one for citations, one for passages to verify, one for ideas to develop. It is a practice familiar to generations of students and researchers, but one that has rarely been implemented with such naturalness in the digital world.

In some ways, the new Scribe also addresses a problem that many readers know well. Not everyone likes to highlight physical books. For some, it means ruining them, turning them into less beautiful, less pure objects. On the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft, almost the opposite happens. Annotations do not deface the book: they enrich it.

They become a personal layer added to the text without altering it. And unlike on an iPad, everything stays on a single device. There are no distractions. No notifications. The Scribe becomes your study, your library, an extension of your mind.

This does not mean that digital has surpassed paper. Quite the opposite. A physical book continues to offer a depth of use that no electronic device has yet managed to replicate completely. The ability to flip through rapidly, skip back and forth, and orient oneself in the physical space of the pages remains a hard-to-match advantage.

But the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft doesn’t really try to replace that experience. Its advantage lies elsewhere: allowing you to carry hundreds or thousands of books with you and to establish an active relationship with them, built upon annotations, highlights, and connections.

This is also why the device’s ideal audience doesn’t necessarily coincide with that of traditional digital notebooks. Rather than writers, designers, or people looking for the perfect sketchbook, the new Scribe seems aimed at students, researchers, journalists, and avid readers. Those who spend a lot of time inside books and want to interact with them more deeply.

The price remains high. The Colorsoft version starts at a figure that inevitably invites comparison with an iPad. Yet, the comparison risks being misleading. For certain people — especially those who constantly study and work on texts — this Kindle could prove to be a more useful tool than a general-purpose tablet.

Because its goal is not to do more things. It is to do one thing better. And after years of evolution, perhaps this is precisely the direction that has allowed Amazon to get closer to the definitive Kindle: not the one that merely displays books, but the one that finally allows you to dialogue with them.