Kindle Scribe - Thoughts?

Anyone here use the Kindle Scribe? How is it? I am between it and the Remarkable and I am undecided. Can you bluetooth a keyboard to it like you can the Remarkable? Office support and Kindle books are weighing me that direction.

I have one, but don’t use it much. There isn’t a lot to say about it. Have you used a Kindle? It’s just a big Kindle that allows you to take notes on a very limited note taking app. Writing on it does feel great, nothing like an iPad/Pencil combo. You can’t write on books exactly, you can insert a note in the text that opens a little card you can write on. I wish I could write on the book pages themselves, but it makes sense why you can’t. You cannot connect a keyboard.

It’s different than the Remarkable in that the Scribe is a reading device that has a stylus with some note taking capabilities. The Remarkable (which I don’t own, but have watched videos on it and I bought a Boox instead) is more of a note taking device and is much more powerful in that area.

I was using the Scribe to do some note taking, and it works great for that, just don’t expect much from the app. It’s very basic without the tools of the competition.

3 Likes

I am also really interested in the forum’s comments. I am looking at the Remarkable, the Scribe and the Kobo Elipsa 2E

Matt Gemmel swears by the supernote, he prefers it to the remarkable.

You can read more on his Mastodon.

@mattgemmell@mastodon.scot

2 Likes

Ill stick with the Remarkable and just break the DRM on my kindle books.

In my research, after buying the Scribe and the Boox, if I had to do it all over again I would get the Supernote. I didn’t because I thought the Boox was more powerful, but in the end I found the Android system adopted to eInk to be too slow and awkward to use for anything. I also found out Boox is constantly pushing out new devices and old ones don’t get a lot of support after they have been replaced. Some people really like the Boox stuff though.

On the other hand, after owning two devices, I still reach for my iPad more than the eInk devices, so I am probably not going to buy any more of these devices.

There are a few YouTube videos that do thorough reviews and comparisons of these things. My Deep Guide, Kit Betts-Masters, and Brandon Boswell are the 3 channels I watched when researching.

1 Like

My coworkers swear by their Remarkables. I haven’t seen anyone swear by their Scribes.

If this data point is not enough, I decided to go for a Scribe because I am all in in Amazon’s bookstore and needed the bigger size, and it’s just that: a big screen Kindle with the ability to do some basic note taking. Adequate for me to substitute for the proverbial piece of paper around my desk, not so sure for you specially if you want to go full paperless. Perhaps Amazon is dropping the ball here, as they obviously have the chops (and the hardware and cloud platform) to best whatever reMarkable is offering for less price.

There are specialized subreddits where I think one can get an idea of the capabilities of each device.

The debate is iPad replacement for me. I don’t really do Art but would love a solid writing only and writing machine.

My wife is low vision, so the Scribe has been a godsend for her. She just uses it for reading, but the Scribe is perfect for the giant text she needs.

3 Likes

Thats awesome for her!

1 Like

Tried both the Scribe and the Remarkable. I went back to the Remarkable, as the Kindle just didn’t cut it for me - partly because it didn’t have grid lined paper for me to write on! Not sure why, but grid lines are my favourite lines for taking notes. Or if it did, they were the wrong size - I can’t quite recall, but for note taking, it was fairly poor in comparison to the Remarkable and therefore it was moved on.

For my use cases, I love my Kindle Scribe. it has a really nice screen, the writing on the screen is very smooth, and I really appreciate the fact that the stylus does not have a battery that has to be charged. The stylus thing is one thing that always drove me nuts about the iPad.

But like many things with digital content, the things that are great about the Scribe can be selectively disabled by DRM, and don’t necessarily apply to all resources.

For example, with a side loaded ePub, I can highlight text and open a note window, and either type or hand-write text. It’s pretty awesome. And I can rapidly export all of my highlights – including getting an email with all of them. And the “notebooks” feature works very well for hand-writing notes as well.

You can basically roll the dice as to which of those features you will get when you download from the Kindle store. Some Kindle books don’t allow handwriting. I don’t know if any of them allow you to export the notes, other than one at a time.

Annotating Kindle content isn’t my primary use case, so that’s almost a non-issue for me. But it’s worth knowing going in.

Other than that, I think it’s a fantastic device. Especially since it also functions as a large-screen Kindle reader, and it’s a solid $100 less than any alternative.

Hope that’s helpful. :slight_smile:

3 Likes

It was! I have a scribe but haven’t used it as much as I thought I would. I hadn’t realised that the drm restricted its functionality so much. Explains a few things.

I recently bought the Supernote Nomad and have enjoyed it so far. I also have the original Scribe and like it as well for reading Kindle books, some PDFs, and for writing longer notes. As others have pointed out in this thread, the Scribe doesn’t have many of the features you would want when writing and organizing many short notes.

I keep the Supernote next to my computer monitor or other screen that I’m using. I usually take short notes on what I am reading or working on. I then transcribe and edit these notes in Apple Notes while reading directly from the Nomad’s screen. This works better than pen and paper, which is what I used previously for this purpose, because I can organize my notes with Ratta’s very good tools for note taking, such as the headings to table of contents feature and the star marking feature. I’m generally happy with the portability of the Nomad and the writing experience.

I have found the Supernote Nomad to be pretty good for reading Kindle books and also for reading ePub books, once you have customized the app. Unfortunately, I have found it completely worthless for reading technical books and articles. I’ll use an iPad for that.

I preferred the Supernote tablet over the Boox 10.3, which I had previously tried. A significant reason for my preference is that the Supernote allows me to remain completely offline while still being able to access the features I need.

2 Likes

Amazon has announced a Scribe 2 which supports in-text annotations.

1 Like

Wow, I am annoyed. But maybe they will add these software updated to the original? I doubt it, because Amazon, but we’ll see I guess.

Yes, you can download the Scribe 2 software features to the first Scribe now.

2 Likes

Great to hear, thank you. I am sorry for doubting Amazon. :wink:

That’s the reason I got the Scribe too.

Just did the manual update to my Scribe v1.

Writing on books works ok, but it can get a bit wonky as it tries to reposition text. One article I read said having a lot of notes on a book increases battery drain though. Supposedly there is a new feature coming with expandable margins for writing. Highlighting and underlining with the stylus works well in books and you can still do annotations that way.

I tried the AI thing on a test notebook. Its summaries and revisions didn’t seem to do much, they just put my writing into a nice font but I couldn’t find any changes. Of course the pages were just random sentences, not real notes, so it didn’t have a lot to work with. It was 100% correct with my handwriting conversion though.

So far, looks good, but I haven’t done anything more than play around with it. People on Reddit aren’t as impressed of course, but I think this is a huge step for the Scribe.