The latest generation of Kindles, including the illustrious Kindle Paperwhite, the poetic Kindle Scribe 2 and 1 and the rumored Kindle Colorsoft (which may or may not be able to interpret hues you can’t even see), all share one curious trait: they no longer appear as external drives when you plug them into your PC or Mac. No, Amazon has quietly guided them away from the freedom of USB file transfer, much like a chaperone at a particularly rowdy school dance. The purpose? Probably to keep DRM in its rightful, invisible place and to discourage you from gallivanting off with files to dubious pirate websites. Meanwhile, the old guard—venerable 9th-generation Kindles and the like—still proudly show up as drives when connected, happily helping their owners sideload and backup ebooks as if this whole "new file system called MTP" business were nothing more than an annoying rumor.

Spotify is a cheeky, upstart musician in the concert hall of digital audiobooks, where giants like Audible and Storytel already hold court. Today it has taken a bold step onto the international stage, waving an audiobook flag in the direction of France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. With the subtlety of a tap dancer in a library, it’s now offering up a smorgasbord of literary voices from the likes of Gaël Faye, Maylis de Kerangal, Joël Dicker, Suzanne Vermeer and Saskia Noort—names that somehow sound better when whispered over a strong coffee. Premium subscribers in these newly inducted territories can dive into over 200,000 titles (that’s roughly one long book per day for 548 years), with a clever option to snag any elusive non-Premium titles à la carte. Meanwhile, non-subscribers are free to purchase anything they fancy, because, well, Spotify’s nothing if not accommodating.

Chinese producer Onyx has launched a new compact e-reader, Onyx Boox P6 Little White Horse. P6 has a rounded design, although the display size remains at 6.13 inches. It features 128 GB of storage, expandable to 1 TB via microSD cards. This should provide sufficient space to store all your e-books, audiobooks, or other material in one location. It operates on Android 13 and supports the installation of third-party apps. The device’s power source is the 3,950 mAh battery, which the company states is sufficient to last 30 days with 2 hours of daily use. It measures 160 × 80 × 8 mm in size, exactly the same as the Palma. One of the key features of the new P6 is the integration of an AI Smart Key on the left spine. Pressing the AI button will activate the AI assistant, which can assist with various tasks, answer your questions and allow you to share content easily.

Amazon has introduced Kindle Colorsoft - its first color e-reader. Rather than relying on the E Ink technology that powers other color e-readers, like Kobo, Amazon chose to build the entire stack in-house. Color is produced with an E Ink Kaleido color filter applied to the screen itself, combined with the front light. It’s a shift from the usual sort of backlighting we see in tablets, which is both a drain on battery and can affect sleep patterns when reading directly before bed. As with monochrome E Ink, the technology effectively generates an image that stays static until the page is refreshed. Amazon says the goal was to create colors that are gentle on the eyes, similar to print. Battery life does take a hit here, but that’s mitigated to some extent by the new oxide back pane, along with a larger battery than the one found on the Paperwhite. When not using color for things like comics and page highlights, the page maintains the same monochromatic design seen on other Kindles.

Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook service, continues to experiment with AI to improve audiobook discovery and offer customized recommendations. The latest feature - AI-powered tags, which analyze customer feedback to offer suggestions according to individual preferences and topic pages that helps users to find similar audio books. The experiment is only available to USA users with iOS and Android devices. Through a new “Tags” carousel in the app, Audible’s AI analyzes customer reviews and briefly explains why other listeners enjoyed a specific audiobook. This allows you to quickly get to the point without having to read numerous reviews.

Mebook has launched the new M6C Color e-reader on Amazon for $199. It features a 6-inch E INK Kaleido 3-color e-paper display with color resolution of 536 × 724 with 150 PPI and it can showcase 4096 different colors. The body hue is a lovely soft white on the front and back plating. The battery is 2200mAh, which should be adequate for a month of reading; its dimensions are 5.02 x 3.6 x 0.25 inches, weighing 90 grams. Mebook M6C has Google Android 11. The UI is heavily customized with a bright and cheerful user interface, making it easy to use your fingers to engage with all the functionality. However, Android 11 is a bit outdated; lots of their competitors are running Android 12 and some are using Android 13, which provides better long-term app support, not to mention additional security.

Ello, the AI reading companion that aims to assist kids struggling to read, launched a new product that enables kids to participate in the story-creation process. Called “Storytime,” the new AI-powered feature helps kids generate personalized tales by choosing from a selection of settings, characters and plots. For example, a story about a hamster named Greg who performed in a talent show in outer space. Kids can pick from dozens of prompts, resulting in thousands of combinations. Like Ello’s usual reading offering, the AI companion — a bright blue, friendly elephant — listens to the child read aloud and evaluates their speech to correct mispronunciations and missed words. If kids are uncertain how to pronounce a specific word, they can tap on the question mark icon for additional help. Storytime offers two reading options: one mode where Ello and the reader take turns and another, simpler mode for younger readers where Ello does most of the reading.

Amazon has begun sending out emails notifying customers about their plan to discontinue the Flashcards feature on Kindles. The Flashcards feature allows you to review words that you’ve looked up in the dictionary and mark them as mastered. However, the Vocabulary Builder feature will remain, so you can still review looked up words, just not using flashcards. Amazon already started removing the Flashcards feature from Kindle apps and they intend to do away with Flashcards entirely in November of 2024. Users can request the flashcards associated with their account from this page at Amazon and continue using them on their own devices, but all flashcards will be deleted from Amazon’s servers later this year, so you need to download them soon.

Audible, Amazon’s audiobook division, revealed that it will develop AI trained on the voices of professional narrators to produce new audiobook recordings. A select group of audiobook narrators based in the U.S. will be invited to train the AI with their voices starting this week, according to Audible. The trained AI will be employed to generate recordings and narrators will have the opportunity to approve their synthetic voice for particular works, as well as modify the pronunciation and pacing. Audible states that narrators who engage in the program will be compensated for any audiobooks produced using their AI-generated voices on a title-by-title, royalty-sharing basis.

Norwegian company reMarkable has launched a new model, Paper Pro, that brings the company’s vision of merging PC with paper closer to fruition, adding color and functionality while preserving the philosophy of focus. The $499 Paper Pro — a new naming scheme to signify it as a premium alternative to the now-$379 reMarkable 2, not a direct successor — is noteworthy for its inclusion of both color and a "frontlight," though both features are somewhat subdued. The color remains subtle and you wouldn’t want to read a comic on the device, but the purpose of adding color is to enhance interactive and creative possibilities. Previously, you were confined to black and white, but now you can highlight, circle, jot and sketch in several distinct colors (they blend but appear best in their pure form). The new frontlight is designed to replace the need for external light shining on the screen, not to serve as a light source itself. It’s also fixed to a specific color temperature range because too much variation would affect the color tone.