Amazon offers new way to get the ultimate Kindle for less

If you liked the look of Amazon's latest ultimate high-end Kindle Scribe Colorsoft but simply can't stomach the dizzying £569.99 price tag, there's another new Kindle on the way that offers much of the same experience for less.

Amazon has confirmed the Kindle Scribe without Front Light is to go on sale in the UK on June 10 for £389.99, a full £180 less than the pricey Scribe Colorsoft.

As the name suggests, this Kindle Scribe has no front light, making it the only current generation Kindle to not have one. It is an incredibly odd name for a product, and very unusual to highlight a feature this Kindle does not have in order to sell it.

The new Scribe also has a monochrome display rather than colour, with these two omissions surely made in order to get Amazon's pen-compatible Scribe down in price and make it more accessible.

Still, £389.99 is an awful lot to pay for a Kindle, even if this one does have an expansive 11-inch display.

Though the first Kindle Scribe in 2022 was billed as a large screen Kindle for reading with the added bonus of an included pen and notebook function to write and draw on digital pads, now the Scribe is very much marketed as a notebook first and e-reader second.

Amazon says the Scribe without Front Light has "an 11-inch glare-free display, built-in notebook, AI tools, and support for popular cloud services". You can have AI summarise your notes into bullet points, search through all your reams of notes, or convert them into text, as well import documents from Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive.

If and when you do want to read a Kindle e-book, you can scrawl notes on them with the pen that comes in the box, though unlike on competing Kobo e-readers, Amazon's software won't let you write anywhere on the page. Instead, you can write something and a text box will form around it, moving the words in the book. Alternatively, you can call up a largin to write in, which can be hidden after the fact.

Amazon has moved to offer such features on the Scribe line up to compete with companies such as reMarkable, which sells E Ink tablets for writing and productivity.

The new reMarkable Paper Pure, released this month, costs £359 and like the new Scribe does not have a front light. It has no native e-book store, but I have been testing it, and the feeling of writing is as close to paper as you are likely to get.

In my experience, Amazon's Kindle Scribes do not feel as good to write on.

But if you want to get your hands on the largest Kindle possible to read the latest books and also like the idea of a digital notebook with all your scribblings backed up to the cloud, the Kindle Scribe without Front Light is the cheapest way to get the latest generation of Kindle Scribe.