Slightly larger, thinner and faster, the 6th generation Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (2024) eBook reader continues to perfect a winning formula.
When you make it to 12 generations of a product, as Amazon has done with the Kindle range, you must be doing something right. Over the last 18 years, Amazon has honed the Kindle reader range to offer an extremely slick reading experience and eBook ecosystem which is hard to beat if you’re happy to live within the walled garden.
Over that time we’ve seen a few premium Kindle models come and go like the DX, Oasis and Voyage. The 2024 range currently sits at five: the standard Kindle, Paperwhite, Paperwhite Signature Edition, Scribe and Colorsoft, the latter of which is yet to arrive in Australia.
The Paperwhite is now in its sixth iteration, and generally hits the sweet spot in terms of price and features. Its big selling point is that the screen is whiter than the grey of the standard Kindle, increasing the contrast with the text so it looks more like paper and is a little easier to read.
At $299, the 2024 Amazon Kindle Paperwhite is $60 more expensive than its predecessor, a common theme with Amazon’s Australian releases this year. In return, it’s slightly better in almost every way. Frustratingly, Australians need to settle for Black and miss out on the choice of Jade or Raspberry colours available in the US for the base model.
Amazon 2024 Kindle Paperwhite
First impressions
There are few surprises when you take a Kindle Paperwhite out of the box these days, because Amazon has it down to a fine art.
Unlike Kindles of old, there’s no physical keyboard or physical home and page-turn buttons – everything relies on the touchscreen. The bezel is thin and the unit very light and slender, to the point where it’s very easy to forget that you’re holding it once you’re engrossed in a good book.
The lack of physical buttons makes the Paperwhite great for both righties and lefties, with the ability to tap or swipe either side of the screen to turn the page – something that soon becomes second nature.
The latest Kindle Paperwhite is an imperceptibly 0.3 mm thinner and 5 gm heavier than its predecessor. The unit is also a few millimetres taller and wider, to allow for the bump up from a 6.8 to 7-inch screen, but again you’re unlikely to notice even with them side by side.
The extremely crisp 300 DPI display makes the screen look as sharp as the printed page. While there’s nothing wrong with the standard 300 DPI Kindle, the improved contrast of the Paperwhite screen is certainly noticeable when you put them side by side.
Minimal glare ensures the screen is perfect for reading outside on a sunny day, unlike a smartphone or tablet. The built-in backlight lets you read in any lighting conditions, even in bed without a lamp, and is easier on your eyes than an LCD screen. You can adjust the warmth of the backlight manually or else schedule it to gradually shift at certain times of day.
It still lacks the auto-adjusting backlight which is found in the Paperwhite Signature Edition and now-retired Oasis. It’s a subtle benefit that you might appreciate if you regularly move between bright and dark environments and don’t want to adjust the brightness by hand.
That said, like many devices, I find that the Signature Edition’s auto-dimming is too aggressive for my 50-something eyes, so I’m forced to disable it at night and manually bump up the brightness a bit. Your mileage may vary.
Across the bottom edge of the Kindle Paperwhite you’ve got a USB-C port for charging, accompanied by a power button. It’s somewhat cumbersome place to position a power button, out of sight so as to maintain the device’s elegant lines.
Not that you need to worry about turning the Kindle Paperwhite off, because the beauty of eInk displays is that they only use power when you turn the page.
When sitting idle the Kindle reverts to screen saver image, and tapping the power button takes you back to your book. All of this means you get a battery life measured in weeks rather than hours.
Amazon Kindle Paperwhite 2024 specs and price
| Display size | 7 inches |
| Display resolution | 300 ppi |
| Display technology | e-Ink 16-level greyscale |
| Light | Manually adjustable front light |
| Formats | Natively: Kindle Format 8 (AZW3), Kindle (AZW), TXT, PDF, unprotected MOBI, PRC Through conversion: HTML DOC, DOCX, JPEG, GIF, PNG, PMP, EPUB, TXT, RTF |
| Onboard storage | 16 GB |
| Charging | USB-C |
| Battery | Up to 12 weeks (2.5 hour charge time) |
| Connectivity | Wi-Fi, Bluetooth |
| Ruggedness | IPX8 – up to two metres of fresh water for up to 60 minutes, or up to 0.25 metres of seawater for up to 3 minutes |
| Dimensions | 127.6W x 176.7D x 7.8H mm |
| Weight | 211 gm |
| Colours | Black |
| Price (RRP) | $299 |
| Warranty | 1 year |
| Official website | Amazon Australia |
Features
The 2024 Amazon Kindle Paperwhite has undergone a range of improvements to enhance the reading experience, although none of them are really that striking.
For starters, you get a slightly larger 7-inch display, up from 6.8 inches on its predecessor. This sounds great, but the practical benefit is minimal.
Side-by-side, using the default font size 5, the 7-inch Paperwhite only displays one extra line of text compared to the older 6.8-inch model. While you might see a few more words on the page, and therefore turn the page slightly less often, it’s not really noticeable when the page-turning experience is so smooth.
Make the font smaller and you’ll see a little more, while make the font much larger and you lose the benefit completely.
Keep in mind the extra screen size comes from making the display slightly taller but barely any wider, which means images won’t look any larger.
The display uses an oxide thin film transistor which gives it the highest contrast ratio of any Kindle Paperwhite but, to be fair, the contrast of the 11th generation Paperwhite was nothing to complain about.
Likewise, a performance boost means that page turns are now 25 per cent faster. There was a time when Kindle improvements were noticeable and welcome, but once again the 11th generation Paperwhite was already pretty snappy. You won’t see the difference when turning a single page, but it becomes more noticeable when you flick through several pages quickly.
While Amazon doesn’t mention it, the new Paperwhite also offers slightly less glare from overhead lights than its predecessor.
Finally, the new Kindle Paperwhite boosts the onboard storage from 8 GB to 16 GB. That’s a welcome improvement but, considering how little space an eBook requires, realistically 8 GB should be more than enough storage for most people.
Keep in mind, Amazon has retired its WhisperNet 3G/4G service, so if you want to load more books you need access to Wi-Fi (which, in a pinch, could be provided by your phone’s hotspot).
This year’s step up to 16 GB would be attractive if you’re also loading on Audible audiobooks, which take up about 150 MB each – if it wasn’t for the fact that listening to Audible audiobooks isn’t available on Kindles in Australia.
The lack of Audible support in Australia is a rights issue enforced in software rather than a hardware limitation. I can attest that if, you play around with the location settings in your Amazon account, the Kindle Paperwhite will happily play Audible books in Australia.
The Australian Kindles does however feature the VoiceView screen reader, which allows visually impaired users to hear Kindle books read aloud via Bluetooth earbuds.
At this point its important to mention the Paperwhite Signature Edition, which is only $30 more expensive than the standard Paperwhite. In return, you get Qi wireless charging, 32 GB of storage and the aforementioned auto-adjusting backlight.
Who is the 2024 Amazon Kindle Paperwhite for?
Having undergone slight improvements in almost every way, the 2024 Amazon Kindle Paperwhite remains the sweet spot of the Kindle line-up. It’s not a massive step from its predecessor, and certainly not worth upgrading, but that’s to be expected when the Paperwhite design is already so refined.
While the Paperwhite strikes a great balance, make sure you weigh up the added features of the Signature Edition to see whether any of them would convince you to part with another $30. It’s a tough sell when Kindles need charging so rarely and 32 GB of storage can’t (or at least shouldn’t) be put towards storing Audible books.
The real frustration with this year’s Kindle Paperwhite is the 25 per cent price hike on the previous model. The new 2024 model is currently discounted to $259, perhaps to allow for the fact you can still snap up the previous Paperwhite for around $249 if you shop around.
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