Amazon announced the upcoming release of three new Kindle Scribes on September 30th, and we knew a color Kindle Scribe was on the way two weeks before then when Amazon sent out emails to their hardware event.
And yet, as we approach the last week of October, none of the new Kindle Scribes are available to order yet. Amazon put up new product pages for each model on the 30th when they were announced, but for some reason they still aren’t available to pre-order.
It’s strange because Amazon announced several other new products on the same day at their hardware event in September, and those were available to pre-order immediately, and some have been released already.
When Amazon announces new products, they usually accept pre-orders right away, especially when it comes to Kindles. I don’t remember Amazon ever coming out with a new Kindle and then not having it be available to order.
When Amazon came out with the first gen Kindle Scribe in 2022, they announced it on September 28th and started taking pre-orders right away, despite the fact the release date was over 2 months away on November 30th.
When they released the revised version of the Kindle Scribe in 2024, it was announced on October 16th, with pre-orders available that day, and the release date was December 4th.
New Kindle Scribe Release Date?
For some reason Amazon hasn’t given a release date for any of the new Kindle Scribes yet. On the product pages at Amazon you can sign up to receive an email when they’re available to order, but nobody seems to know when that is going to happen.
Given Amazon’s recent history, they’re certainly going in a different direction with the release of these new Kindle Scribes. They didn’t give a set release date when they announced them, and in the press release they just said the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft and new Kindle Scribe would be released “later this year” in the US. And they said the Kindle Scribe without a frontlight would be available early next year, along with all three products coming to the UK and Germany early next year.
At this point it makes you wonder if they’re going to do pre-orders at all. Maybe they’ll just start taking orders when they’re ready to ship them, but that’s not how Amazon usually does things so it’s a bit hard to predict.
I have a theory that maybe they’re not doing pre-orders because the release date is too close to their Black Friday sales week. Maybe they want to be able to put them on sale right away after release for the busy holiday shopping season, and the timing is too tight for pre-orders because they can’t do a sale so soon after release or everyone that pre-ordered would return the new Scribe they paid full price for to get the discount.
The one thing that really stands out about the new line of Kindle Scribes is the prices are a lot higher than the first two versions. Maybe Amazon’s strategy is to set a high list price and then do deeply-discounted sales every few months to make people think they’re getting a great deal when they’re $100+ off.
