Amazon announces a slightly cheaper Kindle Colorsoft with half the storage

Amazon finally launched its first-ever color Kindle last year, and while the was an impressive first effort, the high price of entry likely put it out of range of a lot of people. Well, we have good(ish) news. Amazon has now a slightly cheaper Colorsoft to its lineup. At $250, it’s still very expensive, but $30 cheaper than the original model, albeit with some sacrifices made.

At 16GB, the cheaper Kindle Colorsoft has half the storage of the more expensive variant, but given that most ebooks rarely ask for more than around 2MB of space in your library, this might be good enough. If you own a lot of digital graphic novels and comics (ie the kind of media that really makes good use of color display), you can expect those to hog more storage, but you’d still need a very large library to start pushing towards that 16GB limit.

The cheaper model also loses the auto-adjusting front light and wireless charging from the Signature Edition, but beyond that, it’s the same . Like its pricier counterpart, the new Kindle Colorsoft has a 7-inch color E Ink display with up to eight weeks of battery life, a handy pinch-to-zoom feature and an adjustable warm light. Amazon has also fixed the yellow-band issue that plagued some early units, including our first review unit.

Amazon is also offering theKindle Colorsoft Kids, which comes with an illustrated cover, one year of Amazon Kids+ and a two-year guarantee. It also has child-specific features such as Vocabulary Builder and Word Wise to help kids learn new words as they read, as well as support for the OpenDyslexic font and Bluetooth for audiobooks. There are two covers available — Fantasy River and Starlight Reading — and parents can use the Amazon Parent Dashboard to manage and monitor what their child is reading.

The Kindle Colorsoft with 16GB of storage costs $250 and comes with three months of Kindle Unlimited included, and the Kindle Colorsoft Kids costs $270. Both are available today, while the Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition remains $280.