Amazon's color Kindles finally get their long-overdue dark mode

E-readers already deliver some of the most eye-friendly reading experiences you can find, with their reflective electrophoretic displays offering a much gentler alternative to the traditional screens on our phones and tablets. But there’s no reason a good thing can’t get even better, and last year Amazon teased that it was finally planning to correct one big oversight that existed across its Kindle Colorsoft lineup, with the addition of a proper dark mode. And now, it’s finally ready to arrive.

Amazon already brought a dark mode to its family of monochrome Kindle e-readers a few years ago, but so far there hasn’t been a similar option for the color-screen Kindle Colorsoft, nor the new Colorsoft Scribe. The closest we had was Amazon’s Page Color mode, which let you invert the colors for supported titles, but there was no system-wide dark mode option available. Initially, Amazon told us to expect a proper dark mode sometime in 2026, and the company now confirms the rollout of that update starts today, and will continue across the next couple weeks.

Sure enough, as Amazon shows off, we can now apply dark mode styling to not just books themselves, but also the whole Kindle UI. Critically, though, you’re not forced to use it the same way everywhere, and you can pick and choose which screens should have dark mode applied to them, in case you’re used to things like your notebooks only looking right in light mode.

Speaking of those, in addition to the new dark mode, Amazon also mentions its rollout of those new notebook shape tools we already spotted arriving a couple weeks back. They’re called Smart Shapes and make it easier to keep your notes looking sharp with nice, clean geometric constructions. You can just roughly draw shapes by hand, and watch as they’re automatically cleaned up with straight lines and precise curves.

Look for these additions hitting your Kindle Colorsoft and Kindle Colorsoft Scribe over the days to come.