Amazon is gearing up to release two color Kindle e-readers in late 2024 or early 2025. We will see a color Paperwhite and a color Kindle Scribe, two products with vastly different form and function. The Paperwhite will be a dedicated ebook reader, making cover art and shopping a visceral experience and Kindle Unlimited, where many comics and magazines are available, will look glorious. The Color Kindle Scribe will allow users to take notes using the CMYK spectrum and should be able to use 20,000 different colors for drawing, viewing and editing PDF files and ebooks.
Kindle Unlimited is something Amazon has been heavily pushing for years. It is more critical now than ever before. Kindle for Periodicals or the Kindle Newsstand was a way for people to take out magazine subscriptions and read them on their Kindle. Amazon discontinued it in late 2023 and gravitated all of the content to Kindle Unlimited. Comixology, which Amazon also purchased, has thousands of comics and graphic novels available on Kindle Unlimited. So, an Unlimited subscription makes the most sense if you buy a color Kindle or Kindle Scribe Color since all this content was developed with color screens in mind.
Kindle e-readers are a loss leader, and Amazon makes the vast majority of its money from purchasing ebooks and sometimes audiobooks on Kindle. If you have a smartphone or Fire Tablet and visit the store, all the cover art is in full color, giving you the same type of experience when browsing an actual bookstore. I imagine the book-selling experience will look tremendous on an e-reader, especially on a Gallery 3 screen, which can display 50,000 colors. The Kobo bookstore on the Clara Colour and Libra Colour look good, by e-reader standards, but they are using inferior Kaleido 3 e-paper displays, which only show 4000 colors.
The reMarkable Paper Pro was announced earlier this week and gave us some insight on Amazons plans for the Kindle. reMarkable said other paper tablets put a filter on a black-and-white display to produce colours. On reMarkable Paper Pro, coloured ink particles inside the display move around to render what users write and read. The natural colours evoke the feeling of a printed newspaper page. They told me in an email that “In the Gallery 3 platform, E Ink gave us the right ingredients for making a unique colour display. Using that display paper technology as a foundation, our teams have redesigned every part of reMarkable’s signature paper-like writing experience, from the Marker tip to the textured display surface to how reMarkable OS, our custom operating system, behaves. The result is the Canvas Color display, a custom display stack that delivers an even better writing experience than reMarkable 2. Out of the box, Gallery 3 promises “an update time of 30 ms.” On reMarkable 2, it’s 21 ms. On reMarkable Paper Pro, it’s as low as 12 ms.”
A 12 ms response time with Gallery 3 is fantastic and something Amazon could achieve or beat. Remarkable is a small company with a solid engineering team, but Amazon has more money to throw at it and has way better engineers and display experts.
How do we know that Amazon is working on two-color Kindles? “Ming-Chi Kuo pointed out that Amazon is expected to introduce E Ink ACeP (Advanced Color ePaper) full-color electronic paper display technology in 2025 and launch Kindle color readers of approximately 6 and 10 inches.” The commercial name for e-readers using this technology is called Gallery 3.
What exactly is Gallery 3? It is technology made by E INK. Gallery 3 offers some distinct advantages over Kaleido 3, even though it also has its cons. To begin with, Gallery 3 originates in the Advanced Color E-paper Gallery display tech, a full-color reflective e-paper display primarily aimed at the digital signage solution segment. Gallery 3 happens to be the latest iteration of the display tech.
One of the best qualities of the Gallery 3 display tech is its ability to display more than 50,000 colors. It offers 300 PPI resolution in black-and-white and color states, making it a high-contrast display with rich and vivid colors. Behind the scenes, there is a four-particle ink system at work: cyan, magenta, yellow, and white. This ensures each pixel has a full-colour gamut, which translates to a more vibrant and life-like image than ever before. It is important to note that gamut is a range of colors within the color spectrum that the human eye can identify, and it is also a concept of color space.
When E INK launched the tech in 2022, they said, “E Ink is very excited to announce this significant breakthrough with E Ink Gallery 3,” said Johnson Lee, CEO of E Ink. “For the first time, our Gallery full color ink platform series can be offered for an enhanced reading and shopping experience for eBooks, and for colorful document viewing and editing in eNotes. We have invested over 100 million dollars in R&D resources and budget to improve every aspect of this technology. Our team worldwide has worked tirelessly over the past several years and has made a product we can all be proud of.”
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
