After hundreds of years of books being largely unchanged, Amazon has certainly found a lot of ways to refine the reading experience in the last couple of decades. True, the main innovation has been making readers dependent on Amazon via its proprietary Kindle book format and purchase of Audible, but it has at least made this monopoly seamless from a hardware perspective.
With a firm stranglehold on the ebook market, Amazon is apparently ready to refine its Kindle line of ebook readers once again, this time improving the Kindle Paperwhite with two new models which briefly made appearances on Amazon’s Mexican and Canadian sites, with the key specs revealed in all their glory.
In a listing spotted by Good E-Reader, the fifth generation of Kindle Paperwhite was spotted in two flavours: a standard CAD$150 (~NZ$167) version and the CAD$210 (~NZ$233) ‘Signature Edition’. Both come with a decent set of improvements over 2019’s revision, with 17 LEDs (up from five) and a 6.8in e-ink display (up from 6in).
Notably, the extra 0.8in of screen seems to be achieved purely by the reduction of the bezels and won’t take up any more space in the hand. Plus both models inherit a premium feature, previously exclusive to the ludicrously expensive Kindle Oasis: adjustable colour temperature, meaning you can reduce your sleep impacting blue lights before bed.
If you decide to stump up the extra CAD$60 for the Signature Edition, you get two extra features: brightness that automatically adjusts to your surroundings and support for wireless charging when the month-long battery finally gives up. There’s also 32GB of internal storage, rather than 8GB but, as a quick sense check, that upgrades you from the slightly unnecessary 3,100 books to a really unnecessary 15,100 titles.
No word on release date yet, but given the full specs have appeared on Amazon’s own sites along with images and comparison tables, then you can bet it’s imminent. We’d imagine it will be under a number of Christmas trees this year…
