My high school English teacher drilled it into my head that there was a proper way to read a book: “If you've read a book without taking notes, you haven't read it at all.” He was right: taking notes helps me engage with the material in a much deeper way than simply reading.
Nowadays, I'm unable to read anything without writing down my thoughts, and as a result, my Notes app is a messy mess. But it's distracting to open a separate app every time I want to take a note, and it's hard to find those notes later. The Kindle Scribe promises to solve that problem with its note-taking capabilities, making it easy to scribble in the margins like I do on paper.
The original Kindle Scribe, from 2022, missed the mark. Here, finally, was a Kindle with which you could take notes, but you couldn't write directly on the pages of the e-book. Instead, you could only jot down disappearing sticky notes, and only on some Kindle titles. I quickly ditched the Scribe and for the last year have primarily used the Kobo Elipsa 2E.
Since then, Kindle Scribe has come a long way. Now, with the second-generation e-reader, you can finally take notes directly on a wider range of Kindle e-book pages, convert handwriting to text, and even summarize notes in its built-in notebooks.
But Scribe has more and better competition than ever. And with a price increase, it needs to add these new features to make it worth $399.99. This is especially true since the original Kindle Scribe is still available for $60 less and you can download all of these features through amazon's website. <a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GKMQC26VQQMM8XSW&tag=theverge02-20″>latest software update.
The latest Kindle Scribe is almost identical to its predecessor, save for a few cosmetic differences. It now arrives in a beautiful new Metallic Jade colorway and has a uniform, papery white border instead of the original model's asymmetrical black bezels.
Otherwise, the Scribe is still essentially a larger version of the Kindle Paperwhite and shares many of the same strengths and weaknesses as its smaller brother. It remains exceptionally easy to buy and read Kindle books and harder to read them outside of the amazon ecosystem. It's not waterproof or as snappy as the Paperwhite, but it's fast enough with an adjustable warm light and the same sharp 300ppi screen resolution. It's sharper than the $399.99 Kobo Elipsa 2E and on par with the $379.99 Onyx. Box Go 10.3which completely lacks light.
Of course, it's not easy to carry 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 other hand, the extra screen space makes it easier to read and take notes. The tablet weighs just under a pound, which helps with portability.
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But the key selling point of the Kindle Scribe is that you can take notes on it, and on that note, I have mixed feelings. The overall handwriting experience is excellent. As before, there is no delay and it really feels like you are writing directly on paper. It comes 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 since it requires no charging and comes with a customizable shortcut button like its predecessor. (The Premium Pen is now standard, rather than a $30 upgrade option, which partially explains the price increase on the original Scribe.)
While I enjoyed writing with the pen, the Scribe's new note-taking capabilities still don't measure up to the competition. With the new Active Canvas tool, the company finally addresses one of my main complaints with Scribe: you can now write notes that remain visible directly on the pages of the ebook, instead of sticky notes that disappear into an icon in the margins (amazon still offers sticky note functionality if you prefer). The software feature adds a resizable text box around your handwritten note and then redistributes the rest of the page around it. It also works well on other adjustable documents, including PDF and Word files. amazon will also launch an expandable margins feature in early 2025, allowing you to scribble notes in a side panel that you can then hide, although it's not yet available to test.
But amazon still doesn't really understand how people naturally take notes in books or what would make those notes useful. While 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 are only visible in Scribe. You also can't add them to your laptop on the device. Additionally, sometimes the size of the text box alters the formatting of the page and creates extra spaces between sentences. While you can resize, there is a delay that will slow you down. Sometimes my notes disappeared completely, so I had to keep adjusting the size until they reappeared.
What's more frustrating is that you can't circle a word or phrase and write a note next to it. Once you write a note, the page automatically realigns, so many times Scribe would add my note to the wrong part of a line or passage. amazon doesn't let you move text boxes and you can't even draw an arrow from a line to your note, so you can't manually pin it to the correct piece of text either. All in all, it's a frustrating and complicated experience, especially when rivals Kobo and Onyx let you seamlessly annotate pages with easy-to-find notes, just as you would writing in a physical book.
Marking up PDF files is much more intuitive and free from the limitations of Active Canvas, so you can take notes naturally. You can also mark up text-searchable PDF files and export them without losing the ability to search within the text. Unfortunately, you can't search within brands. You also can't bookmark downloaded PDF files; You have to use amazon's Send to Kindle feature. That said, amazon says its documents are encrypted, both while they're being sent, in the cloud and on the device.
amazon also made some improvements to its built-in notebooks, offering a wider selection of templates than when the first Scribe launched. There are 18 preloaded templates ranging from lined paper to dotted paper that you can use as weekly planners, checklists, and more, all of which I found useful. you can too <a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/b?node=32897194011&&tag=theverge02-20″>download more templates from amazonor upload PDF files and treat them as templates.
Scribe also gets two new ai features for its built-in notebooks that can summarize your notes and refine your writing. However, you'll need an Internet connection to use them, and you won't be able to link notes you took in the built-in notebook with notes within eBooks or PDF files. The ai summary feature is still useful, as it does a good job of providing a broad overview of your notes. Meanwhile, the “refine your writing” feature mostly accurately converted my handwriting to typed text, albeit slowly and on a separate page that you can just add to the front or back of your notebook. However, you can't convert Active Canvas notes to written text, which would have been a useful addition.
Even with those additions, the Scribe laptop's built-in capabilities still aren't as rich as its rivals. Similar Onyx tablets can also summarize notes and convert handwriting to text, while allowing you to insert links to notes, files, websites and attachments, record your voice, and access a split-screen feature. The latter allows you to take notes using all the advanced tools integrated into the notebook, while simultaneously browsing applications downloaded from the Google Play Store such as Kindle and Kobo, but also applications such as Kindle. The New York Times. The Kobo Elipsa 2E's note-taking tools aren't as advanced as the Boox's, and it can't summarize notes like the Scribe, but at least it lets you quickly convert handwriting to typed text in the original notebook document.
The Kindle Scribe is a better e-reader for taking notes compared to its debut two years ago. Being able to write directly on the pages of an e-book is a welcome improvement, and converting handwriting to typed text is a useful addition. But while it's starting to align more with rivals like Kobo and Onyx, Scribe still isn't the best option for serious note-taking. It's still too difficult to annotate ebooks and the new features just aren't as useful compared to the competition.
Even if you're just looking for a large 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 <a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GKMQC26VQQMM8XSW&tag=theverge02-20″>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 last generation model. Both are good e-readers for reading Kindle e-books and casually taking notes, but they are almost indistinguishable.
Photography by Sheena Vasani / The Verge
