Amazon’s new Kindle Scribe takes another step toward pen and paper

Ever since Amazon launched the Kindle Scribe in 2022, the company has been noticing some unusual ways people are using the device. Scribe users read more nonfiction than normal Kindle owners; a full 60 percent of Scribe buyers use the device at work. That’s maybe not shocking, given that the Scribe is the largest Kindle and the one with an included stylus for taking notes. But still: this is maybe the first Kindle ever to not be mostly a reading device, but rather equal parts book and notebook. With the new Scribe, which the company announced on Wednesday (and leaked on Tuesday night), Amazon is leaning into the notebook side of things in a big way.

The new Scribe, which will cost $399.99 and will ship starting on December 4th, is a modest design improvement over the previous model. The most noticeable change is the bezels, which are now white and the same size on all four sides. The goal is evidently to make the Scribe look and feel more like a piece of paper — both when you look at it and when you write on it. Amazon has also updated the included stylus, the texture and color mask of the 10.2-inch E Ink screen, and the Scribe’s internal software to make it feel more paper-y. Even the stylus’s eraser is supposedly better: Amazon executives raved about how many people try to brush dust off the device after they work the eraser.

(If you’re wondering why the new Scribe doesn’t have a color screen like the new Colorsoft, by the way, I couldn’t get a straight answer, but the reason is almost certainly price. The Remarkable Paper Pro does color pretty well, but it’s almost $600, and Amazon is far more price-conscious with the Kindle line.)

“We’ve been intentional with thinking about the metaphor of a notebook,” says Kevin Keith, the VP of product on the Kindle team. “We want it to feel like a notebook in your hand.” Amazon continues to see the Kindle as a distraction-free device, free from all the chaos and enticements of your phone and laptop — now it’s trying to apply the same vibes to your writing as it has to your reading. 

I got a brief demo of the new Scribe at an Amazon launch event in New York City, and the Scribe does indeed feel nice to write on. In particular it seems to have done away with some of the delay you might have felt in the previous model; the gap between glass and E Ink surface felt smaller to me, which makes everything feel more immediate and tactile. It didn’t necessarily feel better that what I’m used to from Remarkable and others, but it felt just as good. But that’s one short demo. We’ll have to see how this thing holds up under real testing.

Either way, the Scribe’s software updates are its most exciting new features. Most of them are designed to make the device more useful for writing. A new feature called Active Canvas, for instance, lets you write notes on books or PDFs that are actually anchored in-line with the text you’re reading. 

The effect is pretty cool: when you start to write a note, the text underneath it fades beneath your markups, and when you’re done writing the text automatically flows around your note. If you change the font or margins, the note stays in the correct spot in the text. You can also write notes in a margin that expands to take over part of the screen, if you’d rather write next to text and not directly on it. Or if all you want to do is highlight or underline some text, the Scribe will snap your lines to the text and make everything look neater. I’m slightly skeptical of Amazon’s ability to do this well with all documents, especially the complicated PDFs that Kindles have long had trouble reflowing at all, but the idea here is very cool.

The other thing the Scribe can do now is convert your handwriting into text. And once it does so, it can send your notes to one of Amazon’s large language models in order to do one of two things: summarize either a single page or an entire notebook; or automatically “refine” your handwritten notes by translating them into a of handwriting-style fonts and formatting them more cleanly. Eventually you’ll also be able to search your handwritten notes, too. 

One of our gripes with the original Scribe was that your Kindle notes are in a closed ecosystem. It’s a nice way to take notes, but there’s not much to do with them — they’re just like paper notes, just sitting there in notebooks. That’s still at least partially true, but Amazon’s starting to make those notes more accessible and more useful. The Scribe may still be a Kindle, but it’s increasingly more than just a reading device.