Kindle Scribe (2024) review: nothing to write home about

My high school English teacher drilled into my head that there was a proper way to read a book: “If you read a book without taking notes, you haven’t read it at all.” She had a point – taking notes helps me engage with the material in a much deeper way than just reading.

Nowadays, I’m unable to read anything without writing down my thoughts, and my Notes app is a cluttered disaster because of it. But it’s distracting to pull up a separate app every time I want to write a note and it’s hard to find those notes later. The Kindle Scribe promises to fix this with its note-taking capabilities, making it easy to scribble in the margins like I did on paper.

The original Kindle Scribeby 2022, I missed the mark. Here, finally, was a Kindle that you could take notes on, but you couldn’t write directly on the ebook pages. Instead, you can only annotate sticky notes that disappear — and only on certain Kindle titles. I quickly gave up on the Scribe, and for the past year or so I’ve mostly used it Kobo Ellipsa 2E in contrast.

Since then, the Kindle Scribe has come a long way. Now with the second-generation e-reader, you can finally write notes directly on a wider range of Kindle ebook pages, convert handwriting to text, and even summarize notes in its built-in notebooks.

But the Scribe has more and better competition than ever. And with a price bump, you need to hit these new features to make it worth $399.99. That’s especially true since the original Kindle Scribe is still available for $60 less, and you can download all of these features on it via Amazon. the latest software update.

The latest Kindle Scribe is almost identical to its predecessor except for a few cosmetic differences. Now it comes in a beautiful new color of Metallic Jade, and it also has a paper-white frame instead of the asymmetrical black bezels on the original model.

Otherwise, the Scribe is still very much a larger version of the Kindle Paperwhite at heart, and shares many of the same strengths and weaknesses as its smaller sibling. It is still exceptionally easy to buy and read Kindle books and more complicated to read outside the Amazon ecosystem. It’s not waterproof or as snappy as the Paperwhite, but it’s fast enough with adjustable warm light and the same crisp 300ppi display resolution. It’s stronger than the $399.99 Kobo Elipsa 2E, and on par with the $379.99 Onyx Boox Go 10.3which lacks a light at all.

Of course, it’s not easy to lug around a 10.2-inch e-reader, especially one made of slippery aluminum, and you can’t hold it comfortably with one hand. But on the flip side, the extra screen real estate makes it easier to read and take notes. The tablet weighs just under a pound, which helps with portability.

But the key selling point of the Kindle Scribe is that you can take notes on it, and in that respect, I have mixed feelings. The overall writing experience is excellent. As before, there is no delay, and it really feels as if you are writing directly on paper. It comes bundled with Amazon’s Premium Pen, a small green stylus that comes with a new soft-tipped rubber eraser that reminds me of a real pencil. I loved using it, especially because it doesn’t need to be loaded and comes with a customizable shortcut button like its predecessor. (The Premium Pen is now standard, instead of being a $30 upgrade option, which partially accounts for the price increase from the original Scribe).

While I enjoyed writing with the pen, Scribe’s new writing capabilities still fall short of the competition. With the new Active Canvas tool, the company finally solves one of my main complaints with the Scribe: you can now write notes that remain visible directly on the ebook pages, rather than on sticky notes that disappear into an icon in the margins (Amazon still offers. the sticky notes feature if you prefer those). The software feature adds a resizable text box around your handwritten note, then wraps the rest of the page around it. It also works well on other reflowable documents, including PDF and Word files. Amazon will also release an expandable margin feature in early 2025, which will allow you to write notes in a side panel that you can then hide, although this is not yet available to test.

But Amazon doesn’t really understand how people naturally take notes on books or what would make those notes useful. While the old sticky notes and highlighted passages sync with the Kindle mobile apps, you can’t view Active Canvas notes in your Kindle mobile or browser app, or export them to another app—they’re visible only on Scribe. You cannot add to your notebook on your device. In addition, sometimes the size of the text box put in the format of the page, creating extra spaces between the sentences. While you can resize, there is a delay that slows you down. A few times, my notes disappeared entirely, so I had to keep adjusting the size until they reappeared.

What’s more frustrating, you can’t search for a word or phrase and write a note right next to it. Once you write a note, the page automatically realigns itself, so many times the Scribe adds my note to the wrong part of a line or passage. Amazon doesn’t allow you to move text boxes around, and you can’t even draw an arrow from one line to your note, so you can’t manually move to the correct piece of text. All in all, it’s a frustrating and complicated experience, especially when rivals Kobo and Onyx let you annotate pages seamlessly with notes that are as easy to find as if you were writing in a physical book.

PDF markup is much more intuitive and free from the limitations of Active Canvas, so you can take notes naturally. You can also mark PDFs searchable in text and export them without losing the ability to search in text. Unfortunately, you can’t search in the markups. You also can’t bookmark side-loaded PDFs; you must use Amazon’s Send to Kindle feature. That said, Amazon says your documents are encrypted, both while they’re being sent, in the cloud, and on the device.

Amazon has also made some improvements to its integrated notebooks, offering a wider selection of models than when the first Scribe launched. There are 18 preloaded templates that range from online paper to tips that you can use as weekly planners, checklists and more, all of which I found useful. You can too Download more templates from Amazonor upload PDF files and treat them as templates.

The Scribe also gets two new AI features for its built-in notebooks that can synthesize your notes and refine your writing. However, you need an Internet connection to use it and you cannot link the notes you made in the integrated notebook to the notes in ebooks or PDFs whatever. The AI ​​summary feature is still useful, as it does a good job of providing a broad overview of your notes. Meanwhile, the “sharpen your handwriting” function for the most part accurately converted my handwriting to typed text, although slowly and on a separate page, you can only add to both the front and back of your notebook. You can’t convert Active Canvas notes to typed text, though, which would have been a useful addition.

Even with these additions, Scribe’s built-in notebook capabilities aren’t as rich as its rivals. Similar tablets from Onyx can also synthesize notes and convert handwriting to text, while also allowing you to insert links to notes, files, websites and attachments, record your voice and jump into a split-screen feature. The latter allows you to take notes using all the advanced built-in notebook tools, while simultaneously browsing apps downloaded from the Google Play Store such as Kindle and Kobo, but also as. The New York Times. The Kobo Elipsa 2E’s note-taking tools aren’t as advanced as the Boox and it can’t synthesize notes like Scribe, but at least it allows you to quickly convert handwriting to typed text in the original notebook document.

The Kindle Scribe is a better note-taking e-reader compared to when it debuted two years ago. Being able to write directly on ebook pages is a welcome improvement, and converting handwriting to typed text is a useful addition. But even if it is starting to fall more in line with rivals like Kobo and Onyx, the Scribe is still not the best option for taking notes seriously. It is still too difficult to annotate ebooks, and the new features are not useful compared to the competition.

Even if you’re just looking for a great Kindle with basic note-taking capabilities, the new Scribe is a tough sell when the original model is still available for $60 less and also offers Active Canvas and generative AI features when you get it. download the latest software update (or wait for the over-the-air update in 2025). I would recommend skipping the new Scribe and sticking with the latest generation model. Both are good e-readers for reading Kindle ebooks and taking casual notes, but they are almost indistinguishable.

Photo by Sheena Vasani/The Verge