The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft (starting at $629.99) brings color to Amazon's largest E Ink display, making it an appealing choice for taking notes and reading comics. Its included stylus and robust note-taking software are genuinely effective, and its color E Ink screen handles most content well—though it still can't match the vibrancy of glossy print or the brightness of LCD and OLED screens. That said, it's quite expensive, and we wish it worked more smoothly with non-Amazon content. Ultimately, the $529.99 Onyx Boox Note Air 4C offers far greater value with its lower price and more flexible Android-based system, so it remains our Editors’ Choice for large color ereaders.

Design: Flat, Light, and Simple

The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft is incredibly thin and light. It's bigger than the non-color Kindle Scribe ($499.99), measuring 9.6 by 7.4 by 0.21 inches (HWD) and weighing 14.1 ounces. The standard Scribe is shorter, thicker, and heavier (9.0 by 7.7 by 0.22 inches, 15.3 ounces), and has a smaller 10.2-inch screen. In contrast, the Note Air 4 C measures 8.90 by 7.60 by 0.23 inches and weighs 14.8 ounces. The $599 Apple iPad Air, which has a similar-sized 11-inch screen, measures 9.74 by 7.02 by 0.24 inches and weighs 1.02 pounds

The Scribe Colorsoft features a symmetrical design in Graphite (dark gray) or Fig (reddish-purple) with a consistent and seamless half-inch gray border around the screen, rather than a single wide strip on one side to serve as a grip. The new design results in my thumb spreading over the edge onto the touch-sensitive display, though I didn’t experience any accidental taps.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

A USB-C port located on the bottom edge enables charging, and a button near the top-right corner allows the ereader to enter and exit sleep mode. A thin, shallow notch on the right edge, below the sleep button, provides a convenient place for the included Premium Pen stylus to attach magnetically when not in use.

Like other Kindle Scribes, the Scribe Colorsoft lacks the waterproof rating of smaller Kindles, such as the Paperwhite, so it isn't protected from water. The Note Air 4 C and Apple iPad Air aren't protected, either.

The Premium Pen is simple, with a single button that's flush against its smooth, cylindrical body near the pen-like tip. A dome-shaped eraser button is on the opposite end. The Pen doesn’t require charging. Thanks to the slight texture of the screen, using it feels a bit like writing with a pencil on paper. The friction isn’t quite the same, but it doesn’t have the awkward, too-smooth sensation of plastic sliding across glass. The Note Air 4 C comes with a basic stylus, but you can upgrade to a more advanced one with an eraser for $79.99.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

While it comes with a pen, the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft doesn’t come with a cover. Amazon sells two first-party covers for it. A plant-based leather option, available in Graphite or Matcha, flips open vertically and folds to let the tablet stand up for a steep $89.99. There’s also a real leather cover, available in Caramel, Fig, or Graphite, that opens horizontally like a book and is pricey at $139.99. More affordable third-party covers will likely appear on Amazon soon. (Make sure they’re for the 2025 Kindle Scribe and not the older 2022 or 2024 models.) 

Screen: Color With Compromises

The E Ink screen is a larger version of the Kindle Colorsoft’s display, measuring 11 inches rather than the latter's 7. While Amazon doesn’t provide a resolution, the screen shows the same 300 pixels per inch (ppi) in black and white as every other Kindle and 150ppi for color content. That’s a fundamental limitation of this type of display. The Onyx Boox Note Air 4 C has a slightly smaller 10.2-inch screen, but the same pixel density, and it provides a similar viewing experience. 

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Thanks to the color filter, the unlit screen is darker and grayer than dedicated grayscale ereaders like the ordinary Kindle Scribe. Fortunately, a built-in front light can brighten the picture and adjust white balance to appear cooler or warmer depending on the ambient lighting and your preferences. Although the brightness slider has an automatic setting that uses a built-in light sensor, I found it to be too conservative. Manually tweaking it is as simple as swiping down from the top of the screen and tapping the slider, so it’s not inconvenient to control it yourself.

The front light is even and consistent, and I didn’t notice any light leakage or odd tints when reading grayscale content, as we saw on the Kindle Colorsoft. 

Battery Life and Performance: A Week of Heavy Reading

One of the major benefits that ereaders with E Ink screens have over tablets with LCD or OLED screens is battery life. While you might get a day or two out of an iPad, Amazon claims the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft can last up to eight weeks on a charge if you’re just reading, or up to two weeks if you mix in some writing.

These estimates are based on just half an hour of use per day with the light set at 50%, so you’ll probably need to plug it in more often than that. In testing, the device dipped from a full charge to 73% after three days of reading (mostly full-color comics, with the light at about 80%). It might not be weeks of use, but it's at least one week at this reading pace, while my iPad would have long been drained by now. In testing, the Note Air 4 C lost about 25% of its charge over a week of heavy use.

According to Amazon, the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft can charge from drained to full in 2.5 hours with a 20W USB-C power adapter, but you’ll have to supply your own; the ereader only includes a USB-C cable.

On the performance front, the ereader features a 2.0GHz quad-core processor and is available with either 32GB of storage for $629.99 or 64GB for $679.99. In my time with the Colorsoft, it was quick to open Amazon content, but less quick to interact with content from other sources. The Note Air 4 C comes in just one version with 64GB of storage, but it supports microSD memory cards that can expand the storage up to 1TB.

Meanwhile, the Apple iPad Air lasts just 10 hours per charge, but has a stunningly fast processor that can run almost any app, and it ships with a minimum of 128GB of storage.

Media: Pick Something Else

The Colorsoft is unable to play video content at all due to the limitations of its E Ink screen. While the Note Air 4 C can play video, the experience isn't great due to its slow screen refresh rate. Something like the iPad Air is ideally suited for watching movies and videos, as well as playing games.

Moreover, the Colorsoft doesn't have speakers for listening to audio. Instead, you'll have to pair Bluetooth headphones if you want to listen to audiobooks. The Note Air 4 C and iPad Air have speakers and Bluetooth, and are much better devices for media playback.

Compatibility: Reading and Writing on Amazon's Terms

Amazon’s Kindle ereader interface is designed to facilitate navigation and access to Amazon’s readable content, taking notes, and viewing and annotating your own documents. If you get all your books via Amazon for Kindle, especially if you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited or Comixology Unlimited, you’re good. If you want to read books, magazines, comics, or manga from anywhere else, you’ll have to load them yourself. 

The ereader natively supports Amazon’s AZW and AZW3 Kindle file formats, as well as unprotected MOBI, PDF, PRC, and TXT document formats. It can load DOC, DOCX, EPUB, HTML, and RTF documents after converting them through supported software, like the Send 2 Kindle PC, Mac, and web apps. I’ve had to wrestle with Kindles to get them to successfully load ebooks I’ve purchased from non-Amazon sources, such as Humble Bundle or Project Gutenberg, but it’s always been relatively simple. Reading comics on this ereader is a little more complicated, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

Thanks to its Android platform, the Onyx Boox Note Air 4 C is compatible with the Google Play Store, which makes it far more compatible with third-party content and apps.

Taking Notes: It Mostly Understood My Handwriting

Taking notes is simple and easy. You can create multi-page notebooks or quick sheets to jot down ideas, using your choice of page format, such as blank, checklist, day planner, music, and multiple size options for horizontal, vertical, and graph rules. There are even a few color options, such as a yellow legal pad with blue horizontal lines and a red margin rule. (Nostalgia!)

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Once you have a page open, you can pick up the stylus and start writing or drawing. There are five different pen types, each in 10 colors, a separate highlighter with five colors, and an eraser. Each of these has five different line widths to select. The shader and pencil pen types provide some flexibility for making sketches, but they’re really meant for taking notes rather than sketching. If you don’t want to start from scratch, the writing and drawing tools work on most documents, so you can easily circle, highlight, and scribble over books and reports.

The writing and sketching experience is excellent. The screen responds instantly to the stylus, putting down lines just as if it were ink on paper. E Ink screens don't refresh as quickly as LCDs or OLEDs, so responsiveness is vital here. If my handwriting weren’t horrible, I could certainly use this to take notes.

Erasing is a bit more awkward. The screen shows each stroke as a blob as you move the stylus, then flashes and takes a split second to process what you've erased. For some reason, erasing doesn’t wipe away thick lines as you move the stylus, but tries to clean them up by removing entire sections as if they were rectangles. It trims individual marker strokes so that they have rounded tips and leaves oddly scalloped edges. It means that cleanly and precisely erasing bits of a sketch or drawing is more difficult than it should be.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

If you focus on taking notes, the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft features the same AI summary capabilities as the monochrome model. It can analyze and summarize your handwritten notes with the press of a button. These results are appended as a separate page that you can access by swiping. I tested it with my own handwriting, and it worked well enough to understand my non-cursive writing. It didn’t even try to recognize my cursive, but honestly, that’s fair.

The Boox is at the top of the class when it comes to taking notes, thanks to its wide variety of writing tools, cloud-based storage, and unmatched highlighter. For example, the BooxDrop app makes it simple to sync most any content with the ereader.

Reading: Good, Not Great, for Comics

I love comics. Naturally, my first instinct with the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft was to load it with some comics I picked up on Humble Bundle—and Amazon doesn’t make it easy.

I attempted to sync a few '90s-era Image comic collections and immediately ran into problems. I could download them (without copy protection) in CBZ, EPUB, and PDF formats. Of those, the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft officially supports everything but CBZ. However, the ereader was unable to open the EPUB files I copied via USB, and although it could load the PDFs, they appeared in grayscale only. The files were all too large to upload with the Send to Kindle function. It took hours of experimenting to successfully load comics onto the ereader, with color and proper formatting.

Here's how to load comics you've purchased from sources other than Comixology:

• Download the open-source Kindle Comic Converter, available from GitHub
• Set the output formats to Kindle Scribe and PDF
• Make sure the Color and Chunk Size boxes are checked, and enter 100MB for the Chunk Size
• Load the comic files you want to convert and click Convert to process them
• The resulting files will be chopped up into 100MB chunks that the Scribe can easily open, which is small enough to upload through the Send to Kindle web app
• Note: You must send color PDFs for them to show up in color on the Scribe Colorsoft
• If you don't want these files to be added to your Kindle library and Amazon’s storage, uncheck "Add to Library" and select the Kindle directly to have it sent there without a cloud-based footprint.

These extra steps are irritating, as non-Amazon ereaders tend to be much more forgiving when loading your own media. Kobo ereaders, such as the Libra Colour, allow you to drop in almost any file via a USB connection and often feature OverDrive for accessing ebooks from library systems.

(Credit: Will Greenwald, DC Comics, Marvel Comics)

Comics look nice on the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft. The E Ink display can produce fairly well-saturated colors, especially when the front light is turned up. When relying solely on ambient lighting, colors appear noticeably less vibrant. The images are comparable with what you can get with newspapers or four-color comics on non-glossy paper. The E Ink screen is closer to reproducing newsprint than lighter non-glossy comic book stock, which is why the front light is vital. Increasing the light brightens up the gray and makes the screen warmer, bringing it closer to the '80s and '90s-era Marvel and Image issues I pulled from my collection to compare against. It’s an excellent way to read classic comics.

It doesn’t come close to the range of color that modern glossy comics can produce. For example, Erik Larsen’s early Savage Dragon art and both Alex Ross’s covers and Brent Anderson’s art in Astro City look OK, but their colors aren’t as vivid as they are in the glossy-paged original issues. It doesn’t look bad, and it’s still better than trying to read it in grayscale on a non-color ereader.

(Credit: Will Greenwald, Erik Larsen, Image Comics)

The Scribe Colorsoft’s responsiveness is far better than any other ereader I’ve tested. Page turning is quick for full-color art. Imported PDF comics take barely a moment, though using the navigation slider to skip ahead can take a couple of seconds. Amazon and Comixology comics seem to turn pages a bit more quickly, but the difference isn’t too bad. 

As for ordinary books, the Scribe Colorsoft looks just as good as the grayscale Scribe, or any other grayscale Kindle, at least with the front light set to 40% or higher. If the light is lower, the screen actually appears darker than the non-color Scribe does with the light turned off, and it is downright uncomfortable for my eyes. At or above this minimal front light setting, though, text is sharp and easy to read.