Amazon brings back Kindle page-turn buttons as an $80 add-on for Signature Edition models

Sam Byford reads on a first-generation Kindle Scribe and a Colorsoft, and neither has page-turn buttons ^[5]. "Moving my thumb over to touch a screen every couple of hundred words makes me feel like I'm operating a gadget rather than reading a book," he wrote in Fast Company ^[6]. Pressing a thumb where it already rests, he wrote, keeps him in the text ^[6].

Amazon has its own account of what customers do. "Today, all of our devices are touch-forward, which is what our customers are comfortable with," an Amazon representative said when confirming the Oasis had been discontinued ^[11]. The Oasis had physical buttons from its 2016 launch until it was formally retired in 2024, a run of about eight years ^[10][15]. The new splash page leads with "Buttons are back," copy written for the readers who wanted more than comfortable ^[1].

The buttons come in a case. The $80 Page-Turn Cover attaches with magnets and connects through pogo pins, and the pins are why it needs a Signature Edition Colorsoft or Paperwhite ^[2][3]. Each button can be set to turn the page forward or back ^[4]. Amazon is also selling the Kindle Click, a $35 Bluetooth remote pitched at hands-free reading ^[12]. The cover costs $45 more than the remote, about 2.3 times as much, before the step up to a Signature Edition ^[14]. The report lists neither the Signature Edition's price premium nor which models the Click pairs with.

Byford worked through the obvious explanations for leaving buttons off the device itself. He wrote that he finds cost hard to believe as the reason, that waterproofing is out because the second-generation Oasis added it, and that streamlining does not fit a company that built a cover for selected high-end variants ^[16][17]. The only reason that makes sense to him is that buttons are wanted by some of Amazon's keenest users, though not enough to justify a new Oasis-style model, so the cover offers an official button option "at presumably high margins" ^[18].

The cover is for the reader already buying the top tier who misses buttons enough to spend $80 more ^[2]. Amazon has built buttons for that reader before. Buttons were core to the first Kindles, and Amazon kept a cheaper buttoned model on sale beside the 2011 Kindle Touch ^[7][8]. It brought page-turn hardware back twice before, with the Voyage's squeezable PagePress edges in 2014 and the Oasis in 2016 ^[13][10]. If you were already buying a Signature Edition, I think the cover is worth it. The tradeoff is $80 for a control earlier Kindles had built in, and a case that has to stay attached for the buttons to work.

A product team weighing the same move can sort it on two axes: whether customers once got the feature in the box, and whether the paid version also requires the top model. A new feature sold for every model is an accessory, a new one limited to the top model is a perk, and a returning one sold for every model is a reissue, where the argument is about its price. Amazon put the Page-Turn Cover in the fourth case, a returning feature limited to the top model ^[2][7]. In that quadrant, the customers with the oldest claim to the feature, former Oasis owners among them, pay the most to get it back. Whether the bet works will show in how many cover buyers are still pressing the buttons months later.