This is the first year ever, that Amazon has not released a new Kindle e-reader. The Kindle Paperwhite was due for a refresh this year, but Foxconn, the manufacturing company that makes the Kindles, was not operating at full capacity, due to the pandemic. It looks like there will be no Paperwhite this year and it looks likely that it will be released in 2021.
What will the Kindle Paperwhite 5 have that would be worth the upgrade from the model that came out in 2018? Sources in the upstream supply chain have mentioned that it will have amber LED lights, what’s known as a color temperature system. It will help mute the bright white light with various degrees of orange. This is the exact same system that the Kindle Oasis 3 employs. There are rumors that the new Paperwhite will also have a USB-C cable.
The Kindle Paperwhite line of e-readers are normally updated every every two or three years. The original Paperwhite came out in 2012 and the Paperwhite 2 came out in 2013. The Kindle Paperwhite 3 was released in 2015 and the Kindle Paperwhite 4 came out in 2018.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
