Kindle Colorsoft: The Excitement Fizzled Fast

14 Feb, 2025

I ended up returning my Kindle Colorsoft and I have to say it was a great decision.

In my previous iteration of rambling about my kindle I mentioned how I liked the Colorsoft and enjoyed its use of color on the home screen and the ability to read colored manga. Well after thinking it over for a bit and using it for around a week, I came to the conclusion that sending it back to Amazon was the best course of action. And there's a couple of reasons for this.

The first one is the reason I ended up mentioning in that previous article, which was that the colors were muted and the screen cover ended up being darker as well. I thought I'd end up getting used to it, but it continued to bother me much more than I thought it would. It didn't help that whenever I watched videos of other e-ink readers with only black and white screens - namely the Boox Palma - or compared it to my own Paperwhite, the sharpness of the black and white display was always apparent. I also have an iPad Pro to compare to as well so the color screen was always looking worse comparatively.

Another nice thing was that my Paperwhite is jailbroken so I have the ability to add whatever covers I want and a bunch of other neat features like being able to install KOReader¹ and read epubs natively and giving that up for a color screen that wasn't really there didn't seem to be worth it.

And finally a reason which I wasn't actually expecting was that reading manga was actually a bit more annoying than expected. In the previous article I talked about finding out how to make manga read as if it was natively bought from the kindle store but there were a couple of hiccups, the biggest one being the issue with double spread pages. See for kindle manga, whenever a double page spread appears, you get this nice little preview at the bottom and once clicked, it turns it into landscape. This isn’t the best viewing experience since it reduces the available screen space, but, since most double spreads are wide, expansive panels, the trade-off usually balances out. Except for some reason, it keeps treating the flashback scenes that have their backgrounds black as double spreads. ALL THE TIME. Which is quite annoying. The double spread preview covers the bottom of the page so you'll always have to exit out of it which gets quite tedious when doing with one hand. Here's an example of what I'm talking about but on my Paperwhite

Also just reading manga on the kindle was a bit annoying in general. It probably has more to do with the fact that I'm reading One Piece at the moment but having to switch between double spreads got annoying really quickly. This is most likely not an issue depending on what you read but in One Piece it got very tedious.

To top it all off remember, I had a perfectly well functioning Kindle Paperwhite so that 300 ish dollars seemed a bit too steep for something that kinda started to come off as a gimmick. I also stopped reading a lot of manga on my kindle recently and am trying to go through my physical backlog so ..... yea.