December 10, 2025
Color wars, button cries
The New Kindle Scribes Are Great, but Not Great Enough
Pricey pens, no page scribbles, and fans begging for buttons
TLDR: Amazon’s new color Scribe and third‑gen Scribe are decent but pricey and still can’t annotate directly on ebooks. Commenters slam ad-like review pages, demand physical buttons and voice notes, and debate whether faster e‑ink could reinvent reading—making clear Amazon’s missing the basics people actually want.
Amazon dropped two new note-taking Kindles—the color-screen Kindle Scribe Colorsoft and the third‑gen Scribe—and WIRED stamped them with a “good but not must-buy” vibe. Yes, color highlights are cute and battery life is solid, but you still can’t write directly on ebooks, and the price makes eyebrows climb. The comment section? Absolute theater. One reader asks if this is even a review when a giant “Buy Now” bar hogs the page, turning the whole thing into ad-gate. Another warns that the page margins you see are what you get—no shrinking them unless you edit the book file yourself. Meanwhile, dreamers say ebooks won’t truly evolve until e‑ink screens hit faster refresh rates (think video-level smoothness), unlocking storytelling that scrolls like TikTok—aka “scrollytelling.” Practical folks just want to talk to their Kindle and have it write notes by voice, like an iPad. And then the button brigade storms in: Oasis fans are furious Amazon keeps refreshing Scribes while their beloved buttoned reader gathers dust. The meme of the day: “My Oasis is now a family heirloom.” Bottom line: the gadgets are fine, but the crowd’s split between loving color and craving basics—buttons, dictation, and real on‑book scribbling. Read the room, Amazon
Key Points
- •Amazon introduced two new Kindle Scribe models: Colorsoft (color screen) and Kindle Scribe (3rd Gen, monochrome).
- •Both devices feature a redesigned, taller, slimmer body with an 11-inch display and a new home screen.
- •The Colorsoft model enables color highlighting and color-coded notes; otherwise, the two models are functionally identical.
- •Users still cannot write directly on ebooks on these devices.
- •WIRED rates the new Scribe lineup 7/10; prices are $630 (Colorsoft, 32GB) and $550 (3rd Gen, 32GB).