Seventeen years is a strange anniversary to remember. But at an event launching the four new Kindles, Amazon's chief device and services officer, Panos Panay, reminded a group of media that “Kindle has been in development almost to the day for 17 years.” Panay added that the device currently has the highest sales results, and 20.8 billion pages are read on Kindle every month. But people don't just read on Kindle. Since the introduction of the Kindle Scribe reader in 2022, there has been even more development in tablets for writing on electronic paper, with the recent release of the noteworthy product Remarkable Paper Pro. While this $580 device allows you to write in color, Amazon's Kindle Scribe still only works in black and white. But it may offer enough software updates to compensate for its monochromatic manner.
What's more, the ability to write on an already popular e-reader makes the book-like experience even more realistic, and Kindle Scribe represents what Panay called the “fastest-growing category” of Kindles. You could say it's a 2-in-1 device because it's both an e-book reader and a writing tablet. “I have a great passion for 2-in-1 devices,” Panay said during his presentation, and he used the term multiple times to describe the Kindle Scribe. I hadn't thought about it that way, but I was less concerned about semantics and more concerned about how the Kindle Scribe and its new features felt during yesterday's hands-on session.
I'm the kind of person who needs to physically write something down when planning a project. Whether it's lofty goals to get my life in order or strategizing around certain software releases at work, my hands grab an imaginary pen and paper in the air. For this reason, Kindle Scribe and other writing tablets are calling my name. I reviewed the original Kindle Scribe almost two years ago, and since then Amazon has slowly expanded the feature set and increased the device's usability.
With the original Scribe, Amazon got a lot of the basics right. The latency and smoothness of writing were close to the pen-and-paper experience, and the device felt solid and smooth. The new Scribe performed very similarly in this regard, with little noticeable difference in the way the stylus interacts with the screen, and I didn't encounter any annoying lags in the short time I spent with it.
Scribe made me want more when it comes to software, and it seems Amazon has focused on that this year as well. Don't get me wrong, it's not that the company hasn't improved the hardware. There are some improvements such as new white bezels, a smaller grip, different color options, and an updated stylus with a soft tip that more closely resembles a conventional eraser.
But there are more intriguing changes hidden inside the device. The most significant in my opinion is the new Active Canvas. This directly addresses one of my biggest complaints in my review, which is that the writing of the books and publications was a bit choppy.
To quote myself, in 2022 I said this: “When reading an e-book, you can also take notes. But it's not like you can scribble directly on the words of your e-books. You can use the floating toolbox to create a sticky note and then draw it in the designated rectangle. When you close the note, a small symbol will appear above the word it was attached to, but otherwise your scribbles will be hidden. No annotations in the margins.
This all changed with the new Kindle Scribe. When you're in the e-book, you can simply start writing on the page and a window will appear containing your doodles. You no longer have to find a floating tool kit and choose a sticky tool first. Just write. It's much simpler, and in the Kindle Scribe I played with, it worked almost immediately. Not only is the frame embedded in the text and the words in the book change and flow to accommodate them, but you can also resize the rectangle to take up as much space as you want. The rest of the page will be moved to free up space as needed. I was particularly impressed with how quickly this happened on the demo unit – it was more responsive than switching between notebooks in my existing Scribe program.
What's more, the box containing your note will stay in place, instead of being hidden and replaced by a small symbol. It's clear that Amazon's previous implementation was a basic solution for writing to fixed-format media, while the new approach is more integrated and thoughtful.
And unlike what I said two years ago, you can now annotate in the new collapsible margin. Tapping the top right corner brings up the option to pinch the column, and you can choose whether to have it take up about one-quarter of the width or stretch to about three-quarters. The content in the margin will be scrollable, so theoretically you won't run out of space.
It's not a perfect replica of notes from a real textbook, but it could be better because you won't have to scribble around the edges or write upside down to get your point across. I'm not sure yet because I really need to spend more time with it to find out, but I like that Amazon has clearly taken the feedback into account and thought about how to add the features you want.
The company has also added the ability to use the pen and directly highlight or highlight in these books, and almost every Kindle title supports most of these features. For starters, it would need to be content that allows you to change the font size, so things like PDFs that have been fixed won't work with the active workspace. Word documents are also compatible.
I spend more time writing in blank notebooks than in real books, and in such scenarios, Amazon is using generative artificial intelligence in two new tools: Summary and Enhanced Writing. The first one is quite simple. If you handwritten 10 pages of brainstorming meeting notes, the system can scan them all and sort through only the most important ones. You can add this as a page to an existing notebook as a summary or save it as a separate document.
Meanwhile, refined typing is reminiscent of Apple's handwriting assistant in iPadOS 18, but on a larger scale. While Apple's software makes it seem like it's all about trimming and hiding random words that aren't aligned, Amazon's software takes an entire handwritten page and converts it to text in a script-like font. This works best if you tend to write in a single column with clear indents and paragraphs. I tend to draw random boxes all over the place with breakthrough thoughts, and the system won't replicate that perfectly. For example, the two-column shopping list I quickly made in the Scribe demo was merged into one, and the checkboxes I drew were interpreted as an uppercase Ds inserted at the beginning of each bullet.
This may not seem immediately useful, but if you're the type of person who fears your handwriting, it may save you some embarrassment. More importantly, it can make your writing more readable in case you need to share, say, your script with a production partner. Or if your scribbled shopping list just doesn't make sense to your partner. I also like that even after you convert your notes to text, you can still erase them using the top of the pen and make changes. You will need to restart Refined Writing to regenerate the neatly formatted page. Oh, and I appreciate the flexibility you get here. You'll have several fonts and sizes to choose from, and you can choose which pages you want to format or completely complete the entire book.
None of Notepad's features are destructive, which means you'll usually be able to keep the original written content and save the generated material as attachments. The work of artificial intelligence takes place in the cloud, and your data is encrypted throughout the entire process. Kindle Scribe also displays an animated page showing that it is engaged in an AI generative task, which in my experience lasted at least 10 seconds. This may not be the case with the original Kindle Scribe, which will also receive these software features later this year or, in the case of expandable margins, in early 2025 when it arrives in the new Kindle Scribe.
In its 17 years of existence, Kindle has done much to change the face of physical books, and since its introduction, Scribe has been expected to do the same for notebooks. For someone who likes to carry the equivalent of a thousand books on a super-slim device, the idea of replacing several notebooks with a Scribe is extremely intriguing. Amazon does face stiff competition from reMarkable and Boox, but the sheer size and strength of the Kindle library weighs in its favor. Kindle Scribe will be available in December for a starting price of $400, and I'm hoping to have a test unit available soon to see if I like the new annotations and AI features or not.
