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

My high school English teacher drilled into me the proper way to read: “If you read a book and don’t take notes, you haven’t read it at all.” She had a point—taking notes helped me compare Read to understand the material more deeply.

Nowadays, I can’t read anything without writing down my thoughts, so my notes app becomes a chaotic disaster. But I had to open a separate app every time I wanted to take notes, and it was very distracting to find the notes later. Kindle Scribe promises to solve this problem with its note-taking feature, which allows me to write in the margins as easily as on paper.

original Kindle ScribeSince 2022, I haven’t reached my goal. Finally, you can take notes on the Kindle, but you can’t write directly on the e-book page. Instead, you can only annotate disappearing notes—and only on certain Kindle books. I gave up on Scribe pretty quickly and for the past year or so I’ve mostly been using Kobo Elipsa 2E instead.

Kindle Scribe has come a long way since then. Now, with second-generation e-readers, you can finally take notes directly on a wider range of Kindle e-book pages, convert handwriting to text, and even summarize your notes in the built-in notebook.

But scribes face more and better competition than ever before. As the price goes up, it needs to round out these new features to make it worth $399.99. This is especially true considering the original Kindle Scribe is still available for $60 less and you can download all of these features through Amazon. Latest software updates.

Aside from a few cosmetic differences, the latest Kindle Scribe is nearly identical to its predecessor. It now comes in a beautiful new metallic Jade colorway, and features uniform paper-like white accents instead of the asymmetrical black bezel on the original model.

Beyond that, the Scribe is still essentially a larger version of the Kindle Paperwhite, and shares many of the same strengths and weaknesses as its smaller sibling. Buying and reading Kindle books is still very easy, but reading them outside of the Amazon ecosystem is more complicated. It’s not waterproof, and it’s not as flexible as the Paperwhite, but it’s fast enough, has an adjustable warm light, and the same sharp 300ppi display resolution. That’s sharper than the $399.99 Kobo Elipsa 2E and on par with the $379.99 Onyx Bucs go 10.3no light at all.

Granted, lugging a 10.2-inch e-reader around isn’t easy, especially one made of sleek aluminum and one you can’t comfortably hold with one hand. But on the other hand, the extra screen space makes reading and note-taking easier. The tablet weighs just under a pound, which helps with portability.

But the main selling point of Kindle Scribe is that you can take notes on it, and I have mixed feelings about that. The overall handwriting experience is very good. As before, there’s no lag and it feels like writing directly on paper. It comes bundled with Amazon’s Premium Pen, a little green stylus with a new rubber soft-tipped eraser that reminds me of a real pencil. I love using it, especially since it doesn’t require charging and like its predecessor comes with customizable shortcut buttons. (The Premium Pen is now standard rather than a $30 upgrade option, which partially explains the price increase on the original Scribe.)

While I love writing with a pen, Scribe’s new note-taking features still don’t compare to the competition. With the new Active Canvas tool, the company has finally addressed one of my major complaints about Scribe: You can now write notes that remain visible directly on the ebook page, rather than in an icon that disappears into the margins. Sticky Notes (Amazon still offers a Sticky Notes feature if you prefer). This feature adds a resizable text box around a handwritten note and then reflows the rest of the page around it. It also works with other reflowable documents, including PDF and Word files. Amazon will also release expandable margins in early 2025 that will let you write notes in a side panel that can then be hidden, although that feature isn’t yet available for testing.

But Amazon still doesn’t really understand how people naturally take notes on books, or what makes those notes useful. While old notes and highlighted passages sync with the Kindle mobile app, you can’t view Active Canvas notes on Kindle mobile or the browser app, or export them to other apps – they’re only visible on Scribe . You also can’t add them to notebooks on the device. Also, sometimes the size of text blocks disrupts page formatting, creating extra spaces between sentences. While you can resize, latency will slow you down. A few times, my note disappeared completely, so I had to keep resizing it until it reappeared.

Even more frustrating is that you can’t circle a word or phrase and write down a note next to it. The page automatically realigns once you write the note, so many times the scribe would add my note to the wrong part of a line or paragraph. Amazon doesn’t let you move the text box, and you can’t even draw an arrow from a line to your note, so you can’t manually anchor it to the correct text. All in all, it’s a frustrating, convoluted experience, especially when competitors from Kobo and Onyx let you seamlessly annotate pages with easy-to-find annotations, just like writing in a physical book.

Marking up PDFs is more intuitive and not limited by Active Canvas, so you can take notes naturally. You can also mark text-searchable PDFs and export them without losing the ability to search within the text. Unfortunately, you can’t search within tags. You also can’t tag sideloaded PDFs; you have to use Amazon’s Transfer to Kindle feature. That said, Amazon says your files are encrypted when sent, in the cloud, and on your device.

Amazon has also made some improvements to its built-in notebooks, offering a wider selection of templates than when the first Scribe launched. There are 18 pre-loaded templates, from lined to dotted paper, that you can use as weekly planners, checklists, etc., all of which I found useful. You can also Download more templates from Amazonor upload a PDF file and treat it as a template.

Scribe’s built-in notebook also comes with two new artificial intelligence features to summarize your notes and refine your handwriting. However, you need an Internet connection to use them, and you can’t associate notes you take in the built-in notebook with notes in an e-book or PDF. The AI ​​summary feature is still helpful as it does a good job of providing a broad overview of your notes. Meanwhile, the Optimize Your Handwriting feature largely accurately converted my handwriting into typed text, albeit slowly and to a separate page that you can only add to the front or back of the notebook. . You can’t convert Active Canvas notes to typed text, though, which would be a useful addition.

Even with these added features, Scribe’s built-in laptop functionality still isn’t as rich as its competitors. Onyx’s similar tablet can also summarize notes and convert handwriting to text, while also allowing you to insert links to notes, files, websites and attachments, record your voice, and jump to a split-screen feature. The latter lets you take notes using all the advanced built-in notebook tools while navigating apps downloaded from the Google Play Store (such as Kindle and Kobo) and new york times. The Kobo Elipsa 2E’s note-taking tools aren’t as advanced as Boox’s, and it doesn’t summarize notes like Scribe does, but it at least lets you quickly convert handwriting in raw notebook files into typed text.

Kindle Scribe is a better e-reader for taking notes than it was when it debuted two years ago. Being able to write directly on e-book pages is a welcome improvement, and converting handwriting into typed text is a useful addition. Although it’s starting to get closer to competitors like Kobo and Onyx, Scribe still isn’t the best choice for serious note-taking. It’s still too difficult to annotate ebooks, and new features aren’t that useful compared to competitors.

Even if you’re just looking for a larger Kindle with basic note-taking capabilities, the new Scribe is a hard sell, as the original model is still $60 cheaper and also offers Active Canvas and generative AI capabilities (when you need to buy ). Download the latest software updates (Or wait for an over-the-air update in 2025). I recommend skipping the new Scribe and sticking with the previous generation model. Both are great e-readers for reading Kindle e-books and taking casual notes, but they have little to differentiate themselves.

Photography: Sheena Vasani/The Verge