Amazon has been crushing it on the e-reader and e-notebook space for the past couple of years. In 2025 they released the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft and Kindle Scribe with front-light, both with 11-inch 300 PPI e-notebooks, that specialize in note taking, freehand drawing, editing PDF files and reading books. The company also released a 16GB version of the Kindle Colorsoft with 16GB and also issued a kids version. What does the company have planned for 2026?
New Devices
The only confirmed device that Amazon has planned for 2026 is the Kindle Scribe without front-light, which is considered the most inexpensive Scribe model, with a $300 price tag. It has the same 11-inch screen as the 2025 Kindle Scribes, including all of the new AI drawing features. It should be come out in the first…
Amazon has been crushing it on the e-reader and e-notebook space for the past couple of years. In 2025 they released the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft and Kindle Scribe with front-light, both with 11-inch 300 PPI e-notebooks, that specialize in note taking, freehand drawing, editing PDF files and reading books. The company also released a 16GB version of the Kindle Colorsoft with 16GB and also issued a kids version. What does the company have planned for 2026?
New Devices
The only confirmed device that Amazon has planned for 2026 is the Kindle Scribe without front-light, which is considered the most inexpensive Scribe model, with a $300 price tag. It has the same 11-inch screen as the 2025 Kindle Scribes, including all of the new AI drawing features. It should be come out in the first couple of months, but it remains to be seen how it will sell at full price. It is very likely that this will be the model heavily discounted for Mothers Day, Prime Day and all of the holiday events, since they will want to push this model out to consumers.
Amazon released the Kindle Basic, Kindle Paperwhite, Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition and Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition in late 2024, since these products are relatively still new, it is doubtful that they will refresh these models in 2026. This is primarily due to now new E INK technology that is close to being released in 2026, there are rumours that E INK is working on Kaleido 4 and E INK Carta 1400, but the release date is unknown. The 12th generation Kindle Paperwhite and Signature Edition both employ Carta 1300.
Software and new features
Amazon has updated the product listing for its new Kindle Scribe Colorsoft and disclosed that in early 2026, it will receive full dark mode, where the text will be inverted, with the background black and the text white. Here is the updated text on the Kindle Colorosft listing on Amazon “System-wide Dark Mode will be rolled out in 2026, but currently is not available on this device. This means that notebooks, documents, PDFs, Home, Library, and Workspace can only be displayed with a white background. But you can enable a similar reading experience within millions of Kindle books using the Page Color feature, which, like Dark Mode, inverts the book page color to black and the book text color to white. To enable the feature in eligible books, open your book, access the Quick Actions menu or the Aa menu, and toggle the Page Color to black.
Amazon has disclosed to Good e-Reader that many of the software features found on the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft and Kindle Scribe with Frontlight will carry over to the first- and second-generation Kindle Scribe e-notebooks sometime in early 2026. This includes the new home screen, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and some of the new AI features. Amazon typically keeps many new features on its latest models to encourage people to keep spending money on them. Once it’s been on the market for a while, they tend to make everything backward-compatible.
Amazon also has some new AI features that will roll out to most of the Kindle e-readers called Story So Far that lets you catch up on the book you’re reading—but only up to where you’ve read, without any spoilers. This compliments a new feature they released a couple of weeks ago called Ask this Book, which lets you highlight any passage of text while reading a book and get spoiler-free answers to questions about things like a character’s motive or the significance of a scene.
E-BOOKS
Amazon is making some big changes for downloading your Kindle Books. Starting January 2026, users will be able to download DRM-free Kindle books in EPUB and PDF formats. Amazon said in a statement, “Effective January 20, 2026, readers can download EPUB and PDF files of their DRM-free books from their Manage Your Content and Devices page on Amazon. Only verified purchasers of your book can access the EPUB/PDF files. Customers who borrowed your books through Kindle Unlimited or other services can’t download the EPUB/PDF files, even if the books are DRM-free.”
Amazon often gets lambasted by users and the media for locking people into a walled garden. When this new EPUB change takes effect in January 2026, it will give users flexibility and freedom. This is likely the biggest news for the digital book ecosystem in years. However, it remains to be seen if publishers or authors will enable DRM-Free content on past and future books.
Michael Kozlowski
Michael Kozlowski has written about audiobooks, e-books and e-readers for the past eighteen years. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.