My high school English teacher drilled into my head that there was a proper way to read a book: “If you’ve read a book without taking notes, you’ve not 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 am incapable of reading anything without writing down my thoughts, and my Notes app is a cluttered disaster as a result. But it’s distracting to pull up a separate app every time I want to jot down a note and hard to find those notes later. The Kindle Scribe promises to fix that 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 for me. Here, finally, was a Kindle you could take notes with, yet you couldn’t write directly on ebook pages. Instead, you could only annotate disappearing sticky notes — and only on some Kindle titles. I quickly gave up on the Scribe, and for the past year or so I’ve mainly used the Kobo Elipsa 2E instead.
Since then, the Kindle Scribe has come a long way. Now with the second-generation e-reader, you can finally jot notes directly onto 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, it needs to nail these new features to make it worth $399.99. That’s especially true given the original Kindle Scribe is still available for $60 less, and you can download all of these features onto it via Amazon’s 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 it has even, paper-like white trim instead of the asymmetric black bezels on the original model.
Otherwise, the Scribe is still very much a larger version of the Kindle Paperwhite at heart, and it shares many of the same strengths and weaknesses as its smaller sibling. It’s still exceptionally easy to buy and read Kindle books and more complicated to read outside of the Amazon ecosystem. It isn’t waterproof or as snappy as the Paperwhite, but it’s fast enough with an adjustable warm light and the same, crisp 300ppi display resolution. That’s sharper than the $399.99 Kobo Elipsa 2E, and on par with the $379.99 Onyx Boox Go 10.3, which lacks a light altogether.
Granted, it’s not easy lugging around a 10.2-inch e-reader, especially one made from 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 slightly less than a pound, which helps with portability.
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But the Kindle Scribe’s key selling point is that you can take notes on it, and in that respect, I have mixed feelings. The general handwriting experience is excellent. As before, there’s no lag, and it really does feel as if you’re directly writing on paper. It comes bundled with Amazon’s Premium Pen, a small green stylus that comes with a new rubber soft-tipped eraser that reminds me of an actual pencil. I loved using it, especially since it doesn’t require charging and comes with a customizable shortcut button just 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, the Scribe’s new note-taking capabilities still fall short of the competition. With the new Active Canvas tool, the company finally addresses one of my chief complaints with the Scribe: you can now write notes that remain visible directly on 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 reflows the rest of the page around it. It also works well on other reflowable documents, including PDFs and Word files. Amazon will also be releasing an expandable margins feature in early 2025, too, allowing you to scribble notes in a side panel you can then hide, though that’s not yet available to test.
But Amazon still 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 Kindle mobile apps, you can’t view the Active Canvas notes on your Kindle mobile or browser app, or export them to another app — they’re only visible on the Scribe. You can’t add them to your on-device notebook, either. Plus, sometimes the text box size messes up the page formatting, creating extra spaces between sentences. While you can resize, there’s a lag that’ll slow you down. A few times, my notes disappeared altogether, so I had to keep adjusting the size until it reappeared.
What’s more frustrating, you can’t circle a word or phrase and jot down a note right next to it. Once you write a note, the page automatically realigns, so a lot of times the Scribe would add my note to the wrong part of a line or passage. Amazon doesn’t let you move the text boxes around, and you can’t even draw an arrow from a line to your note, so you can’t manually anchor it to the correct piece of text either. All in all, it’s a frustrating, complicated experience, especially when rivals from Kobo and Onyx let you seamlessly annotate pages with easy-to-find notes just as you would writing on a physical book.
Marking up PDFs is a lot more intuitive and free of Active Canvas’ limitations, so you can take notes naturally. You can also mark up text-searchable PDFs and export them without losing the ability to search within the text. Unfortunately, you can’t search within the markups. You also can’t mark up sideloaded PDFs; you have to use Amazon’s Send to Kindle feature. That said, Amazon says your documents are encrypted, both while being sent, in the cloud, and while 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’s 18 preloaded templates ranging from lined to dotted paper you can use as weekly planners, checklists, and more, all of which I found helpful. You can also download more templates from Amazon, or upload PDF files and treat them as templates.
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The Scribe also gets two new AI features for its built-in notebooks that can summarize your notes and refine your handwriting. However, you’ll need an internet connection to use them and you can’t tie notes you made in the built-in notebook to notes within ebooks or PDFs whatsoever. The AI summary feature is still helpful, given it does a good job of providing a broad overview of your notes. Meanwhile, the “refine your handwriting” feature for the most part accurately converted my handwriting into typed text, albeit slowly and onto a separate page you can only add either to the front or back of your notebook. You can’t convert Active Canvas notes into typed text, though, which would have been a useful addition.
Even with those additions, the Scribe’s built-in notebook capabilities still aren’t as rich as its rivals. Similar tablets from Onyx can also summarize notes and convert handwriting to text, while also letting you insert links to notes, files, websites, and attachments, record your voice, and hop into a split-screen feature. The latter lets you take notes using all the advanced built-in notebook tools, while simultaneously navigating apps downloaded from the Google Play Store like Kindle and Kobo but also the likes of The New York Times. The Kobo Elipsa 2E’s note-taking tools aren’t as advanced as the Boox and it can’t summarize notes like the Scribe, but it at least lets you quickly convert handwriting into typed text in the original notebook document.
The Kindle Scribe is a better e-reader for taking notes compared to when it made its debut two years ago. Being able to write directly on ebook pages is a welcome improvement, and converting handwriting to typed text is a helpful addition. But though it’s starting to fall more in line with rivals from the likes of Kobo and Onyx, the Scribe’s still not the best option for serious note-taking. It’s still too hard 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 the generative AI features when you download the latest software update (or wait for the over-the-air update in 2025). I’d recommend skipping the new Scribe and sticking with the last-gen model. Both are good e-readers for reading Kindle ebooks and casual note-taking, but they’re nearly indistinguishable.
Photography by Sheena Vasani / The Verge
