From that fresh paperback smell to the wrinkles in the spine, nothing beats a real book. But if you’re sick of the space they take up in your home, or the weight they steal from your holiday luggage allowance, it might be worth considering an Amazon Kindle. It can fit thousands of weighty reads into as little as 158g, and as tech goes, it’s almost immune to the sort of pathological time-wasting features that come with modern phones and tablets.
Amazon Kindles have been available in the UK for more than 15 years, so they’re an old-school gadget at this point. But in 2024, the biggest update yet arrived: colour, which added an important extra option to the existing Kindle lineup, alongside readers for children, for note-taking and for tighter budgets. With so many modern versions available now, I spent months testing them to analyse their pros and cons to help you find the best Kindle for your needs.
Amazon clearly has a sense of humour, because no less than one day after I’d finished writing this guide the brand announced a whole new range of Kindles. I will keep this page updated with how the new line compares once I have fully tested them. Available to preorder ahead of their release on 11 November, the Kindle Paperwhite and Colorsoft will be a little lighter and thinner than their predecessors, with a fetching new array of colours.
More significant changes have been made to the Signature Edition models, trading plastic backing for an aluminium one. But it’s the basic Kindle that’ll get the biggest upgrade, with the raised screen border replaced for a flat end-to-end design like the Paperwhite. There are Kids editions of these e-readers coming, too.
The good news about fresh launches is that the models tested here are far more likely to be slashed in price, so you could save some money. I’m a long-term e-reader user; I first tried one in place of paperbacks in 2009, the Sony PRS-505, a year before the first Kindle arrived in the UK. Since then I have tested almost every member of the Kindle family going.
From the Kindle Fire HD (which some say never deserved the Kindle name at all because it’s more tablet than e-reader) to fondly remembered classics such as the Kindle Voyage and Oasis, I’ve lived with them all, for better and worse. I keep coming back to Kindles over other e-readers for their simplicity and reliability – and for Amazon’s ever-changing Kindle book sales. Most of my book reading is done on e-readers these days.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
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