Amazon announces new Kindle Colorsoft and Colorsoft Kids

Since the dawn of time (or at least, since last year) Amazon Prime Day has been followed by the launch of a new range of Kindles. In the wake of last year’s Prime deals extravaganza, we finally received the Kindle we’d been asking for – the Colorsoft, a colour-screen Kindle perfect for graphic novels as well as traditional books.

This year, it’s deja vu all over again. Amazon has just unveiled the new Kindle Colorsoft, which is stunningly similar to last year’s model – in fact, it’s almost exactly the same. But there’s more: the retail behemoth also pulled the covers from the Kindle Colorsoft Kids, an idea so simple we wonder why they didn’t do it sooner.

Here’s what’s new for 2025 – and what’s not.

Kindle Colorsoft – same device, new price

That’s right – the new Kindle Colorsoft is apparently exactly the same as the old one in almost every way. That means it has the same 7in 300dpi mono/150dpi colour display; the same matte-glass finish; the same built-in front light with sensor; the same IPX8 waterproofing; and the same eight-week battery life.

That’s good news, in some ways, as we were impressed by most aspects of the original. In our full Kindle Colorsoft review, we praised the display despite its slightly drab colour reproduction, and we were similarly fond of the front light and the build quality of the chassis. The battery needed some work, we felt, but otherwise the Colorsoft was pretty okay.

Our biggest complaint? The price. At £270 the Colorsoft is prohibitively expensive – not the £380 you’d pay for the high-end Kindle Scribe, but still a lot more than the other models in the Kindle range.

This is the one issue the new Colorsoft seeks to rectify. It’s £240, a saving of £30 – but there’s a catch. The new model has 16GB of storage, versus the 32GB of the original, which means it’s effectively just the variant that should have launched alongside the 32GB Colorsoft last year.

I’m not convinced that a £30 saving is going to be enough, especially given that the Kindle Paperwhite is £160 and nearly identical.

Kindle Colorsoft Kids – a blindingly obvious win?

It’s not all bad news, however. Amazon is also launching the Kindle Colorsoft Kids, which feels like an obvious step and a rather neat way to improve the Colorsoft’s value proposition. This is fundamentally the same product as the new Kindle Colorsoft, but it comes with one year of Amazon Kids+, which adds parental controls and access to a library of over 10,000 child-friendly books (among other things). [STORAGE?]

But to my mind, the most exciting point of differentiation here is the bundled covers. They come in a choice of two different styles, each with a rather eye-catching (albeit distinctly AI-generated) design. They’re called Fantasy Reading and Starlight River, and they look like this:

If I were a book-obsessed child (which I was, and still am) I’d be pretty enthralled by those.

Both new Colorsoft Kindles are out now – the Colorsoft Kids starts at £260 and the 16GB Colorsoft, £240.

Written By

Will Georgiadis Author

Since 2018, Will has been the engine of the Expert Reviews production team as sub-editor, senior sub-editor, and now production editor. Will is responsible for making sure that the content Expert Reviews publishes is of the highest quality; he also keeps the team’s vast workflow running smoothly and maintains the ancient and revered Expert Reviews style guide. With five years of experience behind him and thousands of articles edited, sub-edited and triple-checked, Will is confident that you won’t find a single mistake on the site – and if you think you have, you’re wrong.

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