When Amazon’s Kindle Scribe stylus-equipped touchscreen e-reader first arrived two years ago, it was generally well-received. Still, some fans of the E Ink tablet genre dinged the device for lacking the robust note-taking features of competing devices from ReMarkable and Boox. And after spending time reviewing Amazon’s new second-gen Kindle Scribe here, I can tell you it isn’t much of an upgrade from the original. The improvements seem aimed at addressing those criticisms and enhancing the Scribe’s note-taking and annotation experience, but current Scribe owners aren’t missing much.
Pros
- Redesigned 10.2-inch, 300 ppi display with more paper-like feel
- Upgraded stylus
- Adjustable warm light with 35 LEDs
- Improved note-taking and annotation features
- Easy to send documents to device
- Weeks of battery life
Cons
- Even pricier than previous model
- Needs a cover with a built-in stand
- Can add handwritten notes to Kindle e-books (or DRM-free ePub ebooks), but still can’t directly mark them up
Like the cheaper entry-level Kindle (2024) and Kindle Paperwhite (2024), the Kindle Scribe (2024) also gets a price bump from its predecessor. The base model with 16GB of storage costs $400 (£380), or $60 more than the starting price of the original, which came with a Basic Pen. What do you get for that higher price? Well, the main upgrades here are a slightly redesigned display and an upgraded Premium Pen, which is now included with the base model instead of the Basic Pen. Other improvements involve software updates that are also available for owners of the original Scribe.
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New flush-front display with more “paper-like” feel
The biggest change is to the 10.2-inch, 300 ppi E Ink flush-front display. It has new white borders and a new coating that helps the screen feel more like paper, at least according to Amazon. The other change is to the included stylus. Amazon’s new battery-free Premium Pen is an upgrade over the original Premium Pen and features a new tip on one end and an eraser with a slightly rubberized finish (the previous pen’s eraser button had a hard plastic finish). The new Premium Pen is slightly better weighted and retains the customizable shortcut button. You can long-press the button while writing to activate the highlighter, pen, fountain pen, marker, pencil, eraser, canvas or sticky note. Or you can turn off the shortcut in case you’re worried about accidentally pressing the button while writing.
The 2nd-gen Kindle Scribe’s 10.2-inch has white borders.
While the borders look different than the borders on the original — I like the new white borders but some people may not — the display itself is in the same position and the device is exactly the same size as the original. The specs list it as being 5.7mm thick instead of 5.8mm, although both are listed as being .22 inches thick. Like the original Scribe, this new model weighs in at 15.3 ounces or 433 grams. For comparison, the Kindle Paperwhite (2024) weighs 211 grams and the new upgraded baseline Kindle (2024) is 158 grams. I was able to use the case for my original Scribe with this new model, so the second-gen Scribe should be compatible with any original Scribe accessories.
To me, the combination of the new texture on the screen and new tip on the stylus did indeed make it feel a little more like I was writing on actual paper (it feels more “analog”). Also, the new soft-tip eraser gives you the sensation that you’re using an actual pencil eraser. After you erase something, there’s initially a bit of ghosting (a faint outline of what you erased remains), and then the screen refreshes and the digital residue disappears.
The 2nd-gen Scribe (left) has the same dimensions as the original Scribe (right).
All that said, how I felt writing on the original Scribe and this 2nd-gen Scribe didn’t seem all that different. And using the new pen on the original Scribe made the experience even more similar — new tip on the pen had a noticeable impact. The long and short of it is that it felt fine writing on the original Scribe but it feels a tad more natural using the new Scribe with the new pen. I do like the new eraser, and it’s worth noting that you can buy new tips (or nibs, as they’re sometimes called) for the original $60 Scribe’s Premium Pen (there’s no more Basic Pen). However, you can’t swap out the eraser, which is too bad because the new Premium Pen on its own costs $80.
Aside from that new coating on the screen and the new borders, nothing else appears to have changed. The Kindle Scribe (2024) still isn’t waterproof like the Paperwhite, it’s powered by the same 1GHz Mediatek processor with 1GB of RAM and it’s equipped with the same excellent lighting system with 25 LEDs and a color temperature adjustment setting (cooler white to warmer sepia tones) to go along with brightness levels.
Amazon hasn’t done anything to enhance contrast like is has with the new Paperwhite, but text already appeared sharp with good contrast on the original Scribe. This is obviously a weightier e-reader than the smaller Paperwhite and entry-level Kindle. Therefore it should ideally be used in a case that converts into a kickstand to prop it up and relieve you from holding it during longer reading sessions (Amazon’s cases are very nice but tend to be expensive while third-party cases are available for less). But the large screen is an appealing feature for a lot of folks, particularly for sight-challenged readers who like to bump up the font size while having a decent number of lines appear on the screen.
Enhanced note-taking and AI-enhanced software features
Amazon is touting a few new AI-enhanced features for the new Scribe that are also available for the original Scribe with a software update. While you still can’t directly mark up a Kindle ebook like you can with a PDF file — by that I mean write notes directly on the ebook as you would write on a paper book — Amazon has enhanced its ebook annotation features with its new Active Canvas feature, which allows you to easily attach hand-written notes to the text. It’s a workaround to a problem, but not entirely satisfactory.
Active Canvas works like this. You’re reading an e-book you bought from Amazon and notice a passage you want to annotate. You simply start writing on the screen, make your note, and then click a check mark to save it. A box then appears on the screen with your note in it. If you take a long note, a pretty big box appears in the the middle of the book, which is jarring. You can resize the box to a small size (the text wraps around the box), and then you have to open it up when you want to see the note. Since this is E Ink, an inherently sluggish display technology, everything takes little longer to resize, but it’s zippy enough.
When you take a note with Active Canvas, it leaves a box in the middle of the text. This is the box’s smallest size. You then have to enlarge it to see your full note.
Early in 2025, Amazon will add another new note-taking option called Extended Margin. In the demo I saw it allows you to write notes in a side panel on the screen that you can show or hide after making the note. It seems like a better annotation option, but I’ll have to use it myself before passing final judgment. In the meantime, when it came to annotating Kindle ebooks, I found myself using the highlight feature instead (you highlight a sentence and then attach a typed or handwritten sticky note to the highlighted section).
I also tested the new summarize feature, which quickly condenses several pages of notes you’ve saved in a digital notebook into a concise bulleted script. It works fine, but you do have to take a lot of notes for this feature to work. I also appreciated a new feature that cleans up your handwriting and converts it into clean, easy-to-read script. My handwriting is fairly legible but not great, and the Scribe was able to convert correctly most of what I wrote.
These new features are all good additions, and Amazon already added some new features to the Scribe with software updates over the last several months. Amazon hasn’t increased the number of notebook templates — it still stands at 18, including six lined options, graphing paper, musical notation and to-do lists. But you can add custom templates from outside sources and now create a notebook with different templates for different pages in the notebook (initially, every notebook page had to be in the same template).
There’s also now a lasso tool for moving doodles and illustrations around a page. And some of the PDF mark-up features have been enhanced, though fans of ReMarkable’s and Boox’s E Ink tablets that are more work/study in nature (and feel less mainstream) will likely opine that marking up PDFs still isn’t quite as seamless or intuitive as it could be. Also, Boox tablets offer more flexibility because they’re built on Android and can use the NeoReader app that allows you to directly mark up ebooks, but not DRM-protected Kindle e-books.
The 2nd-gen Scribe propped in my case for the original Scribe (it adheres magnetically to the case). The new Scribe is compatible with legacy Scribe accessories.
As with the original Scribe, you can import a variety of file formats and document types to mark up if you so choose. You can import and write directly on-page in PDF documents (so if you had an e-book as PDF file, it could be marked up) and I found it easy to import PDFs using Amazon’s Send-to-Kindle feature where you simply drag a file into a box on the Send-to-Kindle web page and it gets sent your Kindle (there are other options to send files, including via the Kindle app for iOS, Mac and Android as well as via email). It’s also easy to export files via email.
You can also import and create handwritten sticky notes in Microsoft Word docs (DOCX, DOC), HTML, EPUB, TXT, RTF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP text and graphic files, but not in manga, comics, graphic novels, magazines or newspapers. Like with other recent Kindles, you can listen to Audible audio format (AAX) or text-to-speech audio with Bluetooth headphones or speakers. Last year, Amazon in collaboration with Microsoft added a feature that allows you to export a Word doc directly from a computer to your Kindle Scribe within that Word doc.
Back when we did our review of the original Scribe, my former colleague Sarah Lord, a serious note-taker, was disappointed that the Scribe’s notebooks lacked any smart features, including the inability to convert your handwriting to text, insert equations or get help in drawing shapes or straightening lines. Now you can have your handwriting converted to text, and there is the new summarize feature, so the Scribe does now have some “smart” features, though it could have more and hopefully will in time.
Is the Kindle Scribe (2024) worth the money?
In some ways, the new Kindle Scribe (2024) is a bit of a weird update. Most of the upgrades are more cosmetic in nature. While they do slightly enhance the writing experience, they’re not exactly game changers. I tell people who already own the original Scribe that it’s probably not worth upgrading to the 2nd-gen Scribe.
As for folks looking to save some money by buying the original Scribe, I’d advise against taking that route because I always prefer to get the latest model of a device unless I’m getting a serious discount (I don’t consider $60 to be that serious a discount, particularly when you factor in the inclusion of the new Premium Pen with the 2nd-gen Scribe).
At its core, like its predecessor, the Scribe (2024) is a large format Kindle e-reader, and a very good one. As a writing device, while quite capable, it still may not satisfy serious note-takers who are fans of E Ink tablets from ReMarkable, Boox and others that lead with their robust note-taking capabilities while having certain limitations as e-readers (they’re obviously missing access to Amazon’s extensive Kindle eco-system and its massive library of ebooks). But the Scribe has improved as a note-taking and annotation device and should continue to get better over time with software updates as Amazon does seem to be listening to users feedback and trying to address their gripes.
Of course, the latest stylus-compatible Apple iPads, Samsung Galaxy Tabs and other tablets with LCD and OLED color displays not only offer significantly faster performance, but they’re far more versatile. However, they tend to cost more (Apple doesn’t include its $130 Pencil 2 stylus with its tablets), the Scribe is lighter and its screen can be viewed in direct sunlight.
Also, compared to a tablet, it delivers much better battery life. You can get up to three months of battery life if you just use the Scribe as an e-reader (based on 30 minutes of reading a day), but note-taking draws more energy and cuts battery life down considerably. However, depending on usage, you can still get weeks of battery life while note-taking and doodling.
That’s my way of saying that while the price for the Kindle Scribe (2024) is pretty darn steep, one can rationalize paying that much for it if you’re the market for jumbo E Ink e-reader that’s a capable though not exceptional note-taking device. With the ReMarkable 2 costing around $450 and the ReMarkable Paper Pro, which has an 11.8-inch color E Ink display, starting at around $630, the Scribe doesn’t seem so expensive.
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