Comparisons

The Paperwhite is the middle of the Kindle range: bigger and better-equipped than the basic Kindle, smaller and cheaper than the Scribe, and — the reason many people cross-shop it — up against Kobo’s Libra Colour.

• Basic Kindle (11th generation). Smaller 6-inch screen, no warm light, not waterproof, less storage. Genuinely fine as a plain reader, and cheaper. Choose the Paperwhite for the warm light, the water resistance and the larger page.
• Kindle Scribe. A 10.2-inch screen and a pen, aimed at note-taking and PDFs. Not waterproof, much heavier, and a lot more expensive. Choose it only if writing on the device matters to you.
• Kobo Libra Colour. Same 7-inch size and also waterproof, and it adds a colour screen and physical page-turn buttons. Its bigger advantage is an open ecosystem: sideloading EPUB and running KOReader are straightforward, where on the Paperwhite they mean conversion or jailbreaking. Choose the Paperwhite if you buy from Amazon and want the simplest possible setup; choose the Libra Colour if you want to control your own library.

The specification table below is generated from each device’s data.