Amazon Kindle Scribe review: A very good writing tablet and a pretty good e-reader
A big Kindle with a pen for taking notes? Sounds great. And for the most part it is.
You already knew the pen was mightier than the sword. Now, it's gunning for the keyboard. The Kindle Scribe is Amazon's first e-reader to include a stylus, one that lets you write directly on the e-ink screen. (In your face, paper!) You can add handwritten digital "sticky notes" to books, mark up PDFs and create all manner of full-page documents: lists, journals, sheet music and so on.
This is a slick, premium-grade device, one that's surprisingly pleasant to write on, but it has a price tag to match: The Scribe starts at $340 for the 16GB model with Basic Pen. I tested the $390 model that comes with 32GB of storage and the Premium Pen. Here's my Kindle Scribe review.
VERDICT: If you love e-books but have long wished for a Kindle with a larger screen, this is it. The Scribe is also great for basic note-taking, though you should know the limitations before picking up this tablet.
- Thin and light
- Crisp, paper-like screen
- Very pleasant for note-taking
- Notes and highlights sync to Kindle apps
- Less expensive than many competing products, and often on sale
- No page-turn buttons
- Rudimentary note-to-text conversion
- Very few Kindle books support on-page writing
- Some limits on document syncing and sharing
This is an updated version of my original review, one that reflects a number of software-based improvements Amazon rolled out in the months after launch. Many of them address problems or limitations I cited previously, resulting in a product I can more wholeheartedly recommend.
But let's first address the flat, rectangular elephant in the room: Why choose a Kindle Scribe over, say, an iPad 10.9 and Apple Pencil? Granted, the latter pair would cost you even more (around $450), but an iPad offers significantly more capabilities than a Kindle — to say nothing of a color screen. And the Pencil affords not only note-taking, but also art creation. (Seriously, you should see what my graphic-designer daughter can do with the Procreate app.)
On the other hand, the iPad handwriting experience isn't quite so paper-like, and battery life is a fraction of the Scribe's (which promises up to three weeks' worth of writing, based on half an hour per day). iPads can also be quite distracting, with games, movies and whatnot clamoring for your attention. Just as an ordinary Kindle offers a distraction-free reading experience, so does the Scribe leave you alone for journaling.
The value side of my brain says an iPad offers more bang for the buck. The creative side loves the Kindle for its elegant simplicity.
Kindle Scribe: What's it like as an e-reader?
If you've used a Kindle before, there's nothing too revolutionary here except for the size: It's a glorious 10.2 inches, which lets you see a lot more text at once. There's a downside to that, though: Because the screen is wider and taller than most print books, I found that my eyes had a hard time adjusting to the extra movement. Thankfully, like all Kindles, the Scribe offers line-spacing and margin adjustments, which enabled me to create a more comfortable layout.
Landscape mode now supports two-column viewing, a feature I've long enjoyed in the Kindle app for iPad. Curiously, you still have to venture into layout settings to toggle between portrait and landscape modes; although the screen can auto-rotate 180 degrees, it can't seem to do 90 degrees without manual intervention.
Whatever orientation you choose, the display delivers a crisp 300 pixels per inch (ppi), resulting in text that's virtually indistinguishable from print. Like most other Kindles, it includes a "warm light" option that softens the LED lighting to a more amber color, nice for evening reading.
The Scribe feels incredibly thin and lightweight when you pick it up, though it does tip the scale at just under a pound. As it happens, the iPad 10.9 is just a hair thicker and heavier. An entry-level Kindle, meanwhile, weighs only 5.5 ounces, so it's much easier to hold for long periods of reading. Although the Scribe has a roomy bezel on the side that makes for a fairly comfortable grip, I did find myself two-handing the device at times.
While that makes this less than ideal as a straight-up e-reader, the Scribe might prove an excellent option for those with eyesight issues: You can choose a large font size and still fit a lot of text on the screen. I do wish the device had physical page-turn buttons, though there's so much screen estate that swiping is hardly a hardship. I'd say Amazon's Kindle Paperwhite is probably the smarter pick for serious readers, but even the baseline Kindle is a great device as well.
Of course, the Scribe isn't solely for reading; it's also a writing tablet.
Kindle Scribe: What's it like for taking notes?
The Scribe's plastic stylus requires no batteries, no charging and no pairing; it just works. A strong magnet clips it to the side of the screen when not in use, but it could easily get knocked loose in a purse or backpack. I could already feel myself growing concerned about misplacing or losing the Pen, especially given that replacements cost $30 and $60 (for the Basic and Premium versions, respectively).
As noted, I tested the Premium Pen, which adds a dedicated "eraser" (which I discovered I can't live without) as well as a shortcut button. I liked the circumference and heft; it made scribbling on the Scribe feel joyously paper-like — and it even sounds that way, too. There's zero lag between pen strokes and digital ink appearing beneath them; the overall experience really does emulate putting pencil to papyrus.
A small onscreen toolbar, which you can collapse when not needed, lets you choose between pen, highlighter and eraser modes, with a choice of five thicknesses for each of them — plenty for simple note-taking. It also has helpful undo and redo buttons. A post-launch update added pencil, fountain pen and marker options to the slate of drawing tools, and I was pleased to discover that all these tools are pressure- and angle-sensitive: Lines get thicker when you press a little harder with the stylus or write at an angle.
Although there's no on-device handwriting recognition to convert your notes into actual text, you can send any note via e-mail and have it converted to text along the way. In my tests this worked fairly well, but I wish the converted file could be a nicely formatted Word document or the like; your only option is raw text in a .TXT file.
When it comes to annotating books, you can select some text and handwrite a note in a pop-up window, complete with all the standard writing tools. But if you're hoping to scribble in e-book margins, you can't; only a smattering of Kindle books let you write directly in their pages, and those are mostly journals, crossword puzzles and the like.
The tablet does offer a generous assortment of notebook templates, including numerous styles of lined paper as well as a dot grid, graph paper, sheet music, a checklist, day and weekly planners and more. For anyone asking, "Why is this thing better than a pencil and $3 spiral notebook?" there's your answer: On a single device you can have 18 different kinds of notebooks, with enough storage to hold literally thousands of pages.
Meanwhile, you can send just about any kind of file (PDF, Word document, image, etc.) to the Kindle via e-mail (it has a dedicated address) and then use the Pen to add notes. If you have a Microsoft 365 subscription, you'll find a "Send to Kindle" option in Word, with two available formats: one that lets you write directly on the page, one that limits you to adding virtual sticky notes.
One ongoing letdown here is that the Scribe can't sync with, say, a Google Drive or Evernote account. In fact, the only way for documents to get on or off the device is via e-mail; those you create on the Scribe are sent as PDFs. And speaking of syncing, any notations you add to an e-book on the Scribe can be viewed on Kindle apps.
Competing writing-tablet devices like the Onyx Boox Note Air 3 and Remarkable 2 offer a bit more flexibility here; the former can even run Android apps, including Kindle. The Scribe makes document creation fun and easy, but still falls a bit short on document, markup, syncing and sharing.
Kindle Scribe: Should you buy it?
What we have here, then, is a big e-reader that's also a writing tablet. But do these two halves, both of which have some limitations, combine to make a compelling whole?
If you're someone who reads a lot and likes to add notes and highlights along the way, the Scribe is a great tool. Just grab the pen, select some text and then scribble your thoughts. This is vastly superior to the traditional Kindle method of highlighting with your finger and tapping a small onscreen keyboard.
As a basic digital notepad, the Scribe also has its merits; anyone who prefers taking notes by hand to tapping them out on a keyboard will love the smooth, easy feel of the stylus and screen. And although you can't sync those notes anywhere, you can easily dash them off via e-mail.
I like the Scribe even more now than I did at launch, as Amazon seems committed to rolling out regular improvements. Even so, wait for a sale; Amazon devices routinely get discounted, and the Scribe sometimes dips well below $300.
