2024 Kindle Colorsoft and Paperwhite Review: No perfect choices
The world of ebook readers is in a weird place, but when hasn’t it been?
E-readers have always been a strange product niche, not just since that oddball first-generation Kindle, but since our first attempts to make computerized books in Hypercard or on PalmPilots.
Paper books are a great medium, tested by the centuries—but the prospect of packing as many books as you want into a small computing device has been a temptation too great for many of us to ignore. Others remain unmoved; the Kindle didn’t destroy paper book sales, and even in my own house, I’m usually found reading an ebook while my wife is almost always reading a paper book.
For those of us who love e-readers, though, that love can be fierce: I love reading books, mostly fiction, and according to GoodReads I’ve read 58 so far this year! Almost all of those were ebooks. E-readers take up very little space (even for massive thousand-page tomes!); download books (either from a bookstore or library) instantaneously; offer a respite from the distractions of our phones, tablets, and computers; let you pick your own typeface, size, and other visual specs; work flawlessly in bright sunlight but also light themselves gently when they’re inside; are easy on the eyes because they’ve got reflective screens that work just like paper; have batteries that last vastly longer than our other tech devices; and are generally waterproof, so you can read at the pool or in the tub or on the beach without worry.
My love for e-readers is strong. But there apparently aren’t enough people like me to feed the growth of a technology category, so the last few years the e-reader manufacturers—and I’m going to focus on Amazon’s Kindle and Rakuten’s Kobo because they are the leaders in this space—have been trying to find other use cases beyond reading text on a page, so they can bring in more users and make more money. Many e-readers support a stylus for handwritten notetaking, something that makes sense to me on a large, PDF-friendly device like the Kindle Scribe, but makes less sense on a small, trade-paperback-sized device.
The latest tech innovation in e-readers, driven by some remarkable engineering breakthroughs by E Ink, the maker of the screens on all of these devices, is the addition of color. Earlier this year, Kobo rolled out a series of color displays, and replaced its excellent Libra 2 with the $220 Libra Colour.
As remarkable as E Ink’s color screen tech is, it comes with one huge tradeoff: the screen’s got a visible light gray dot pattern, which is always there and decreases contrast when you’re just reading words on a page. Words on a page! It’s kind of the top priority when you’re reading a book, I think. If you’re going to degrade that experience, even a little, the trade-off needs to be worth it.
Here comes the Kindle Colorsoft
Now Amazon has integrated that same E Ink color screen—but with some modifications, the company says—into the new $280 Kindle Colorsoft. I’ve got to hand it to Amazon—the Colorsoft’s screen is visibly better than the one on the Libra Colour, and I suspect it’s largely because the device’s lighting rig makes everything brighter, which reduces the issue of reduced contrast.
But is that trade-off worth it, when Amazon sells several non-color versions—the Kindle Paperwhite line—for between $80 and $120 less?
There are some contexts where color really adds to the Kindle experience. Obviously, if you’ve got the Kindle’s home screen set to display book cover thumbnails, they’ll all pop out in color. (Congratulations, book publisher art departments, those tricks you use to draw people’s eyes at airport bookstores will work on e-readers now too!) I’ve seen a lot of coverage that praises how nice it is to see a color book cover when you turn off your e-reader, but when you turn off the device, its backlight turns off. Without the backlight, the color is barely visible except in very bright light. It’s not a reason to spend more money on a color screen.
Okay, you can highlight text in different colors, which is fun but probably of limited utility. If you read a book with color images, they’ll be in color, and that’s great—I would’ve loved that back when I read my daily newspaper via Kindle, but Amazon killed that feature a long time ago.
So what we’re left with, really, is comics. And Amazon has a huge advantage here, having purchased Comixology, which helped pioneer comic reading on smartphones with Guided View, which maps the sequential narrative of comic pages so you can read the page a panel at a time. This is vitally important on devices with smaller screens, because no iPhone—and none of these tiny e-readers—has a big enough screen to make an entire comic page legible when it’s fit into view.
I don’t like reading comics on my iPhone, but at least it’s responsive when I pinch to zoom and swipe to move around. The problem with E Ink screens is that their refresh rates are poor, so zooming and scrolling is not nearly as nice as it is on a phone. (Again, I don’t want to bash E Ink—the fact that they make a color screen that has a remotely usable frame rate is amazing! But it’s no smartphone screen.) You can do it, but I found it really unpleasant and I would never read a comic that way unless I was desperate.
Here’s the good news: Amazon supports Panel View for comics purchased via the Kindle Store, which is basically the old Comixology Guided View feature. Double-tap on any comics page and you’ll enter a mode where first the entire page is displayed, and then when you tap to advance, each panel is displayed individually, zoomed in to fill the screen.
I read issues of several comics, including my gold standard, Watchmen, on the Kindle Colorsoft, and you know what? It worked. It was a perfectly acceptable panel-by-panel comic viewing experience. There was one surprising frustration: sometimes panels are wide, not tall, and the Kindle doesn’t have an accelerometer, so it won’t auto-rotate when you turn the device sideways. You can do it manually, but that’s no fun. Wide panels end up being really small and hard to read.
I’m sure some people will find Panel View an absolutely great way to read comics, and more power to ’em—now your book-reading device is also a comic-reading device, and Amazon is the world’s leading provider of digital comics. However, and I can’t stress this enough: there are much better devices to read comics on, and they’re called tablets. LCD backlight displays can reproduce the bright range of colors in comics very well; the Colorsoft’s color is, well, soft.
And while Panel View is the only thing that makes comics readable on a Kindle (or smartphone), and I’m glad it exists, you really do lose something when you take storytelling that’s intended to be viewed as a whole page containing individual items, and turn it into a sequence of rectangular boxes you can only see one at a time. It’s a clever hack that also breaks the artist’s chosen form, and can do so in some peculiar ways.
Unless you have some very specific needs, such as reading material that is truly made better with color, paying more for a color screen just isn’t worth it—at least not yet. I’d be less strident about this if the color E Ink screens didn’t degrade black-and-white reading contrast, but right now they do. Save your money and buy a cheaper e-reader.
(Also, yes, apparently an early batch of the Kindle Colorsoft had a yellow patch at the bottom of the screen—and mine was one of the ones affected. I would imagine that Amazon will fix this issue forthwith and replace any affected devices, but it’s yet another reason to say no to the Colorsoft.)
A better option: 2024 Kindle Paperwhite
Speaking of cheaper readers, I also tried out the 2024 edition of the $160 Kindle Paperwhite. Physically it seems identical to the Colorsoft, which means Amazon’s mid-range Kindle line now extends from a $160 black-and-white reader with ads and no ambient light detector, to a $180 version if you remove ads, to a $200 Signature Edition with no ads and an ambient light sensor, to the $280 color model. Ergonomically, all of these variants are pretty much the same, right down to the power button on the bottom edge that’s way too easy to press accidentally.
As of today, I’d call the $200 Paperwhite Signature Edition the sweet spot in the Kindle product line. Amazon’s cheaper Kindle ($130, $110 with ads) isn’t waterproof and doesn’t offer a flush front, both of which make it a lot less appealing to me. The cheaper non-Signature Edition Paperwhites are fine, but having the ability to auto-adjust brightness on a Kindle is a really nice feature that doesn’t add a lot to the price. (Unlike Kobos, which let you run your finger up and down on the edge of the screen to adjust brightness, adjusting brightness on a Kindle is a multi-swipe/tap process. Kindle’s auto-adjusting brightness isn’t perfect, but it’s better than nothing.)
As always, though, I’m not an enthusiastic supporter of the Kindle product line. It feels to me that Amazon’s priorities for the product—Color! Stylus! Trials of various Amazon subscription services!—just aren’t the same as mine. The discontinuation of the excellent Kindle Oasis at the top of the line—the last Kindle with physical page-turn buttons—says a lot about where Amazon is focusing its Kindle these days.
I don’t want to belabor the point, but I find that resting my fingers on a physical page-turn button rather than tapping on a touchscreen to be a superior reading experience—and Amazon’s just not interested in buttons. Apparently that’s true of most people, including my pal Scott McNulty, but it’s a shame that there aren’t any options in the Kindle line. (Even the Boox Palma has buttons!)
Amazon’s Kindle software has gotten a lot better in recent years. Its Overdrive library integration has come along so far that I think it might be better than that offered by Kobo, in that you can send books checked out from multiple libraries to a single device without sideloading. Kobo still has the advantage of letting you browse your library on-device, but the Libby smartphone app is so good that I never bother using anything else to check out books these days.
Kindle’s typography controls are a little less granular than Kobo’s. And with these 2024 models you can no longer copy files to the Kindle via the Finder, but must use a utility like Android File Transfer or the new USB File Manager feature inside Amazon’s Send To Kindle app. (They still work perfectly with Calibre, which is my go-to ebook file manager and converter.)
What else is there?
If you don’t want a Kindle, there are other options, but I no longer find that there’s an easy, go-to recommendation that clearly beats the Paperwhite. Kobo has phased out its $190 black-and-white Libra 2, my previous pick, and its replacement (the Libra Colour) is more expensive with a worse reading experience. The larger $270 Kobo Sage is the closest thing to a Kindle Oasis that is being sold today, but not only is it pricey, it’s got a feel that’s substantially less premium than the Oasis was. The Kobo Clara BW is $130, so basically the equivalent of the cheap Kindle, but waterproof.
Beyond the big two, it’s slim pickings. I tried a Barnes & Noble Nook recently, and came away convinced that nobody should ever buy one. I’ve dabbled quite a lot with Boox’s line of Android-forward e-readers, and while they keep getting better, they require so much configuration and maintenance (because they’re basically Android tablets with E Ink screens) that they’re only for very tech-savvy people who don’t mind fiddling with Android details. And they’re not cheap, either!
I take pride in being able to recommend the best e-reader for most people, but it’s about as complicated a task as it’s ever been. If you’ve got an older model you love, you may want to hang on to it and see if things change in the next few years. If you’ve got a load of Kindle books and don’t want to deal with moving to a different platform, the Paperwhite Signature Edition is my pick. Yes, it’s $200, but it’ll last for many years.
If, like me, you’d sort of like to free yourself from the Amazon ecosystem, your choices are fraught. I wish Kobo made a black-and-white successor to the Libra 2, but at least as of right now, it doesn’t. Maybe search eBay? And while you’re there, look for used Kindle Oasis models, which are all also excellent and will be usable for years. (If my Kobo Libra 2 died today and I wasn’t able to bring my Kindle Oasis out of retirement, I’d probably buy a Kobo Sage despite the price.)
So I guess that’s where we are, right now, in the weird world of e-readers. The Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition is pretty much the best all-purpose e-reader out there right now. I don’t love it, but it’s solid in a lot of ways. And if you are that wild person who wants to read comics panel by panel on your Kindle, then go ahead and get the Kindle Colorsoft. Nobody’s going to stop you.
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