The Amazon Kindle line of e-readers are in a good place. They have the Kindle Basic model with a front-lit display and a new E INK Carta screen. The Paperwhite 4 is now waterproof and the Oasis 3 has a new color temperature system to help mute the bright white screen, when reading at night. There is also the new Kindle for Kids edition, but they don’t sell many of these.
What is next for the Amazon Kindle and where do they go from here? All 3 of their products have Audible integration, so users can purchase audiobooks and listen to them with a pair of wireless headphones or earbuds. Every model now has a front-lit display and a high resolution e-paper panel. The Basic and Paperwhite each have six inch screens, while the Oasis has a seven screen.
On the software side of things, each one is exactly the same, since Amazon tends to keep everything updated and there are no features that are only on one specific Kindle. You can look up people, places and things in an ebook with X-Ray, look up words in the dictionary or do translations via Bing. You can take part in the social media platform for books, Goodreads. There is also other things, such as profiles which remember your font selection, font size and any reading settings you adjusted, useful if you share it with the family. Kindle Unlimited is a subscription platform for ebooks and Prime Reading gives you thousands of ebooks, graphic novels and magazines for free, well, as long as you are a Prime Member.
Amazon is not very risk averse, they tend to let companies such as Barnes and Noble or Kobo innovate and see what new features resonate with readers. This allows Amazon to not do anything new anymore, but merely react to the current market conditions.
Will Amazon do anything new for the 11th generation Kindle or the Kindle Paperwhite? Will the 4th generation Kindle Oasis have anything specific, that will warrant an upgrade from people with older models? What can Amazon do to make you upgrade? Should they take advantage of the new E INK color e-paper that we previewed at an exclusive Wacom event in Japan? Should they do their own e-note and compete against Remarkable or Sony? Amazon has always been a consumer company when it comes to their Kindles, a device aimed at professionals might be too bold.
What do you think Amazon should do with the next generation of Kindles that will be released next year?
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.
