Kindle Surprise: the next chapter of an E ink ecosystem?

Here’s something surprising: there’s Amazon Kindle news!

This past week, Amazon announced four new Kindles. This is the first sign of life in the Kindle line for a long time. In fact, I feel, this is one of the largest announcements in the history of the Kindle.

While the Kindle Colorsoft looks promising (I’m waiting to read reviews before I preorder, given the price), the real excitement came from the new features in the Scribe that allow writing in books and the side note feature. A real vote of confidence for the platform is that all the new features are coming to the previously released Scribes as well.

Panos Panay — the long-time Microsoft device executive who created the Surface and is now at Amazon — talked with The Verge about the new Kindles. The conversation really showed the commitment and enthusiasm he has for the platform. Everything he said about the Kindle line -- including the limited nature of the operating system -- was in line with what makes the devices so great. He describes the core of why the product exists:

Well, it goes back to what’s so interesting about the Kindle as a product for me is that from the very beginning, the Kindle was always sort of not about itself. The less you spent thinking about your Kindle, the more you. It’s like the truth in a product that disappears into the background.

He spoke at length about how the Kindle can exist alongside other devices, and how their E ink devices don’t need to be devices that do it all, but rather, do a few things really well: reading and note-taking.

Panay:

Once you try and get kind of too cute with features or go too far, you start getting away from what we really want, which is the analogous moving from the analog to the digital and just writing on paper. It's very dangerous once you start introducing more, by the way, you can. It's why we added a couple of Gen AI features to it, but two very simple... [at] the end of the day, what you need is fundamentally put your pen down and start writing and as if it was paper.

I’ve been meaning to write more about my recent E ink and Ereader journey over the past couple years, but a big takeaway has been that I’ve always come back, in one way or another, to the Kindle. They are easy to use. The only decision to make when picking up the device is what to read or write.

I’ve spent hours trying to get my E ink devices set up correctly, and then maintaining them, the Kindle is, well, an oasis. While devices from Boox offer numerous features and flexibility, it comes with the tasks of tweaking the screen settings to have an experience that even comes close to reading on a Kindle.

Technology is all about making choices. And it’s just not what device or service is best for the task at hand, but what fits best into your life. The Kindle announcements show there’s a serious commitment to digital devices that mimic analog reading and writing. While we will have to see what happens in the coming months and years, this is one of the most exciting times since the release of the first Kindle 17 years ago.