https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/AMZN/ announced a new Kindle e-reader on Wednesday, and for the first time, it has a color screen.
The retail giant introduced the Kindle in 2007, and every device since has had a black-and-white screen. The new Kindle has a screen designed to ensure that colors don’t look washed out or pixelated, even when users zoom in on images.
The $279 device, which Amazon calls the Kindle Color soft, has “weeks of battery life,” the company says. It’s available for pre-order now and ships Oct. 30.
Amazon also unveiled a refreshed $399 Kindle Scribe with new note-taking features, an updated $159 Kindle Paperwhite and a 12th-generation Kindle that costs $109. At a press conference in New York on Tuesday, Amazon’s head of devices Pianos Panay called the updates the “biggest single refresh the Kindle line has ever had.”
The Kindle Scribe, which Amazon introduced in 2022, comes with a pen that lets users take notes, create to-do lists, and write directly on the pages of the book they’re reading. A new note-taking feature, called Active Canvas, lets users take notes directly on the pages of an e-book and the text automatically slides to flow around them. They can also take notes in the margins of the book and hide them for later.
The Kindle Scribe includes another new feature that uses generative artificial intelligence to summarize pages of notes into a concise list. Amazon said the feature uses Bedrock, a software tool that gives users access to large language models from Amazon and other companies like Anthropic and Stability AI. The device is available for pre-order now and will ship on December 4.
The new Kindle Paperwhite is faster than previous models and also has a larger 7-inch display, compared to 6.8 inches on the previous version. Amazon says the 12th-generation Kindle is the most “compact” e-reader ever, with a brighter display. Both devices are available starting Wednesday.