(Even right out of the box, the yellow tinge was clear as day.)

The most amazing part of  the Kindle Colorsoft launch fiasco is how quickly Amazon managed to turn eager early adopters (among them, many tech review influencers) into an angry mob. Wouldn’t you be angry, too, after paying $280 for Amazon’s first color e-reader, only to discover a permanent, inch-wide yellow tinge spread across the bottom of the screen?

I migrated to e-books ages ago. If I’ve read a book in the past decade, chances are it was on a Kindle device or in an iPad or iPhone Kindle app, or even on an ancient Barnes & Noble Nook. Like iPods and albums in the early 2000s, I loved and still love carrying my entire reading library around in my pocket or backpack. On the stand-alone devices, I always found the monochrome experience comfortably retro. I’m very Gen X that way.

But when Amazon did full-court press in mid-October to announce the new Kindle Colorsoft, my Scooby ears perked up. I may love me a good Kindle, but my autism is not a big fan of wading through a sea of black-and-white book covers in my Kindle library. Being able to browse a color library–and a color Kindle Store? Now that sounded like a real stress-tamer for me.

I took advantage of a juicy early adopter promo to trade-in my old Kindle Paperwhite for a $60 discount on a pre-order of a new Kindle Colorsoft and a $30 Amazon gift card. (Pretty good deal, I thought, for a device I originally paid $120 for.)

Two weeks later my new Colorsoft arrived. Immediately, using it felt joyful. Like reading a newspaper with full-color photos. Not tablet-like photos, not meant to be. A breath of fresh air to be able to browse my library in color–and I didn’t mind the slight haze that the new color display layer gave to text, either. That’s probably why I didn’t notice the yellow tinge at first–although it’s clearly there in the photo above this post that I took minutes after taking my Colorsoft out of the box and setting it up.

Then the complaints started popping up–and they never stopped. And a few days after loving my Colorsoft, I saw it. Some people say it gets worse over time–the yellow discoloration across the bottom, and sometimes sides, of the display. I play with my Kindle brightness and warmth options all the time, and I think that distracted me at first. But once you see the weird, prominent yellow bar across the bottom of the display–almost like someone wrote across the display with a yellow hi-liter–you can’t unsee it.

For people (clearly at this point, lots of people) who use their Kindle a lot, it quickly becomes very fucking annoying. Especially for a device that costs nearly three-hundred bucks. The only way not to see it, or be distracted by it, is to pump your display warmth up so that the yellow from the warmth blends in with the bottom stripe. But at that point, it’s like looking at your Kindle through a bucket of pee.

Tech news sites have now reported that a new optically clear adhesive used by Amazon on the Kindle Colorsoft display has unexpectedly aged early–turning yellow in the process. Which means it’s a hardware flaw–and one so glaring that it defies reason to believe Amazon didn’t know about it in advance. (Not unless they did no pre-release quality assurance testing whatsoever.)

It’s ridiculous Amazon went to market with the display flaw. Were they hoping no one would notice? Now reviewers are saying there won’t even be a hardware fix–Amazon may try to “fix” the hardware fault via a software patch. How? By making your whole display yellow? Or putting a black bar across the bottom of the screen? Either way, hard nope.

Lucky for us silly early adopters, Amazon has deigned to offer options for dealing with our broken Kindles. (Because sell me a $280 color e-reader with an accidental hi-liter color permanently across the screen and AFAIC that’s a broken e-reader.) And right on brand–for Amazon, anyway–they all suck.

Amazon is not reaching out to Kindle Colorsoft owners. You have to be angry enough to Google the problem for yourself–or run across the tiny blurb about the issue at the bottom of the Colorsoft product page. Those intrepid enough to manage to discover that they have any options at all, find out you have to request a call from Amazon Customer Service.

Once you figure out how to do that, a completely detached customer service rep calls to tell you, in the most monotone voice imaginable, that you can either return or exchange your dingy Kindle Colorsoft.

If you return it, you’ll wait 2 to 4 weeks for your funds to be processed back to you. If you exchange it, you can only do so for a new, hopefully corrected Colorsoft–and they’re not shipping for 3 to 5 weeks. (What does Amazon have against just saying, “About a month”?) Until then, you get to keep on using your faulty one.

If you want to exchange your Colorsoft for a different new Kindle model, now you’re really asking for the moon, aren’t you? Amazon will flat-out not process that for you in one transaction. Instead, you have to initiate a return–triggering that 2 to 4 week wait for your funds back–and purchase a different new Kindle separately. Which means, until your refund arrives, you’re essentially lending Amazon a couple three hundred bucks for a month for free.

And if you traded-in your old Kindle (like I did) for a discount on your new, pee-like Colorsoft, you better hadn’t dare want to return it, because fuck you, Amazon will not give you that value back. The suicidal customer service representative will, however, offer you a super-secret 20% discount code to purchase a new, different Kindle (that very definitely is not 20KINDLE2024.) But you’ll still have to do the return and new purchase separately. (And, of course, wait about a month–see how easy that was to say–for Amazon to give you your money back.)

All in all, the handling of this complete launch misfire has been unacceptably customer unfriendly. Amazon could make it so much easier for the people who placed pre-orders, traded in their old Kindles, and early adopted the Colorsoft to get their money back and get new devices. You would think they’d want to do that after all the hard promotion the Kindle management team did with tech media and influencers in mid-October. The whole point of that effort was to get those of us who purchased first to become brand ambassadors.

Instead, the nearly complete lack of proactive customer service for what is Amazon’s 100% own goal and no one else’s fault has turned most of us into naysayers. The Kindle Colorsoft product page is full of one-star reviews. (Including mine–it was originally a five-star review, but then, of course, all of the above.) That’s a lot of marketing money thrown down the toilet.

I originally considered exchanging my Colorsoft for a new one, and waiting about a month (oops, I used it again!) for it to arrive. But once I learned Amazon was considering not physically fixing the defect at all (I mean, how fucking cheap can you possibly be after screwing over your own long-term Kindle customers), I lost all faith in Amazon’s ability to deliver an acceptable color Kindle right now.

So today I initiated a return of my janky Kindle Colorsoft, and used the covert-agent 20% discount code to order a new 2024 Paperwhite. Amazon CHARGED ME A FUCKING DOLLAR to send me a return label, and at this point are you surprised?

They’re also making me buy my own shipping box at UPS. I feel like sending the fucked up little Colorsoft back in a shipping crate, like the time Amazon Fresh delivered me a single avocado in a giant shopping bag.

But they’d probably charge me extra for that, too.

__________

Update: Two days later, my replacement 2024 Kindle Paperwhite arrived. The entire bottom half of the display was yellow, far worse than the issue on my Colorsoft. It’s going back, too. There’s clearly a systemic hardware issue with the entire 2024 Amazon Kindle product line. Don’t buy one. 

Categories: Books and Words Kindle Shopping TECH

Mike

I’m an #OpenlyAutistic gay, Hispanic, urbanist, Disney World fan, New York native, politically independent, Jewish blogger in Chicago. I believe in social justice, big cities, and public transit. I write words and raise money for nonprofits. I’ve written this blog since 2005. And counting...

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