Kindle Colorsoft and Manga Shenanigans

01 Feb, 2025

So I bought a kindle colorsoft this week and the experience has been ..... "meh". Let me explain.

First of all, this was a complete impulse buy. I have a nice functioning paperwhite that has no issues. The only thing that happened here was that I thought "Ooh, color! I like color! I'm gonna buy!" and here I am now with a new kindle colorsoft. I could try and justify it to myself with "reasons" but they'll all be cope.

With that aside, I do have to say that color is definitely cool. Here's the startup screen in full color

And here's a page of One Piece, also in full color

Alas, while color is definitely cool, it does come with some downsides. The images are significantly more fuzzy and grainy when color is displayed and the colors themselves are quite muted. Covers on the lock screen also seem to come off a lot darker as well. Most of this was made pretty clear from all of the reviews I read and watched and so it wasn't a complete surprise but it was still pretty jarring looking at it for the first time. Amazon does say that sharpness stays the same when looking at black and white text but the only things that I've read so far are color manga so can't really confirm or deny this. All in all though, having color definitely makes looking at your library more appealing and seeing the kindle store with the actual book covers makes the home page a bit more lively.

Another tangentially related thing to this purchase is that I finally learned how to get manga to look properly nice on the kindle. Previously I was using kcc¹ to format my manga and while it wasn't bad, you miss out on certain features like preview double spreads and the ability to skip through pages quickly etc. Well thanks to this article that I found, that problem has been solved. I can now enjoy my manga on my kindle in the same way as if it was bought from Amazon itself. The only problem left is that series grouping isn't possible on any sideloaded books / manga and from my googling around doesn't seem to have a solution so I'm just gonna end up having a bunch single issues just sitting in my library. But now that I have color now, I can enjoy them in (most) of their glory! See, the colorsoft was a good purchase.