Amazon is working on a Kindle Paperwhite 5 e-reader and and the big selling point are the amber LED lights, giving it a color temperature system. This is the same warm light system that that Kindle Oasis 3 employs. Amazon should announce this new Kindle sometime before Prime Day, which is set to occur sometime in October and Black Friday, at the end of November. Although, due to supply chain constraints, due to COVID, it could be pushed back into early 2021.
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.
Every single Kindle Paperwhite model on the Amazon website is sold out, this includes the 8GB and 32GB models. All of the different color variants, such as black, plum, sage and blue color models are also not available. The soonest they will be in stock ranges from the end of September to the end of October. This could be due to shortages of the existing model, due to supply chain issues. Throughout the year, Amazon has beens sold out of various Kindles on their Canadian and US websites. The Kindle Oasis 3 and Paperwhite 4 have been not available for months at a time.
The upstream supply chain has confirmed with Good e-Reader that Amazon has been designing and testing a warm light Kindle Paperwhite for most of the year, it was supposed to be manufactured in the second quarter, but got pushed back, due to Foxconn only operating at less than 30% efficiency since April, due to COVID. The same thing happened to the Kobo Nia, it was supposed to come out May, but only got released a July.
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.
