Hands on: Amazon Kindle Scribe 2024: An excellent 2-in-1 eReader gets annotation and a healthy infusion of AI

If the main thing holding you back from buying the 2-in-1 Amazon Kindle Scribe was that it wouldn’t let you scribble on books or in the margins, I have some good news for you.

Amazon’s latest Kindle adds markup capabilities (of a sort) and throws in a subtle yet spiffy redesign for the big-screen eReader and notetaker and its stylus companion. There’s even a small yet important helping of generative AI.

Pricing and availability

Amazon unveiled the 2024 Kindle Scribe on October 16 along with a new Kindle, Kindle Paperwhite, and its first color E Ink device, the Kindle Colorsoft. The Kindle Scribe lists for $399.99 and will ship in December.

The look of it

Amazon Kindle Scribe has never been your typical Kindle e-reader. At 10.2 inches, the screen is more than three inches larger than the biggest Kindle screen (currently the new 7-inch Paperwhite). In addition to touch, it supports high-precision pen input thanks to a Wacom Digitizer panel below the surface.

The new Amazon Kindle Scribe 2024 edition doesn’t change any of that. Size, weight, and specs are the same as last time, but the reader does look different all the same. The metal body is now a brighter green and, in an unheard-of move, Amazon surrounded the display with a wide white border.

As Amazon’s Kindle VP Kevin Keith told me, it is much harder to hide things like components and sensors behind a thick white bezel. Still, I get the intention; that white border is intended to make the thin and light e-reader look even more like a giant white piece of paper. It’s a pretty good effect.

The Pen probably got a bigger redesign, with refined looks and now an elastomer eraser nub on the back end that feels like a real eraser when used on the Scribe’s screen.

Display: 10.2

Storage: 16 GB, 32 GB, or 64 GB

Dimensions: 196 x 230 x 5.8mm

Weight: 433g (Pen: 17g)

Am expansive display

The E Ink display remains a wonder. It has just enough roughness to feel like paper and that’s especially effective when you put the new stylus to work on it. There’s just enough friction to feel like you’re dragging a real pen across paper.

When you combine it with the 300 ppi resolution and near-zero latency, it’s easy to forget that you’re writing and drawing on a digital panel and not real, if slightly gray, paper. These capabilities are largely unchanged from the original Scribe, though the redesigned pen does feel better in the hand, and the eraser is now fun to use. Though I was surprised that when I erased digital ink, the little rubber nub seemed to leave some actual elastomer crumbs on the display – this may be taking verisimilitude a tad too far.

While my hands-on time was brief, it was enough that I could try out writing, reading, and drawing on the large display. It’s all quite satisfying, but it’s also not necessarily what defines this new Amazon Kindle Scribe.

Intoducing Active Canvas

The new Kindle introduces Active Canvas, which finally adds some in-book notetaking to the Scribe experience. It was not live yet on most of the demo units I tried, but I got a few solid demonstrations and think that this will please those who thought the original Scribe was lacking this key feature.

Active Canvas is simple. If you want to annotate a book, you can just start writing right on top of the section in the book. As you write, the text under where you’re writing fades away, and then a box appears, and the book text automatically flows around it. You select a check to set the box, which you can then resize, but more importantly, that annotation remains anchored to the text in the book. I watched as an Amazon rep resized the font, and the annotation held fast.

Amazon is also adding expanded margins for annotations that will similarly anchor to positions in the book. That feature, which I did see working in demos, will ship sometime after Amazon ships the Scribe.

A dose of AI

The Amazon Kindle Scribe wouldn’t be a new product in 2024 if it didn’t get a little dollop of AI. In this case, it’s a two-pronged attack: Refinement and Summarization.

Again, I could not try these features out for myself, but I did watch closely as another Amazon rep demonstrated them.

Refinement seems tailor-made for me and my very messy handwriting.

The Scribe has extensive note-taking features, but I find it fairly useless if all my notes are not organized or clarified in some fashion. The Refinement feature is a good first step. It uses a cloud-based generative AI to read and clean up my notes.

The process, which starts with you selecting a little quasar-like icon in the upper right corner of the screen, takes 15-to-20 seconds and sends the encrypted data to Amazon’s Bedrock Gen AI server. The system returns an incredibly cleaned-up version of your notes. They look handwritten, but that’s because they’re now in Amazon’s custom handwriting font, which can be easily resized.

This process certainly makes the notes more glanceable, but I think it’s the Summarization feature that will change things the most for avid Kindle Scribe notetakers.

It goes through the same process of selecting the AI icon, but you then have to choose if the system is to summarize the current page or all your pages in that note file. I, naturally, would always choose the latter.

What’s returned looks like a brief, handwritten, and concise summarization of what can be quite lengthy and messy notes. Unlike your own handwritten notes, it’s the kind of thing that you might be comfortable sharing with coworkers.

Amazon uses a variety of LLMs (large language models) to figure out all handwritten notes. When I asked Amazon Kindle VP Kevin Keith which LLMs it was employing he demurred, telling me instead, “We continually look for the best models, and that’s what’s great about Bedrock. You can change out different models.”

There was, by the way, no mention of Alexa AI or Alexa AI integration in these new Scribe tools, which is a shame but perhaps we’ll see it in future Scribe and its Gen AI updates.

The pens’ the thing

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Because Amazon Kindle Scribe uses Wacom digitizing technology, the Scribe Pencil needs no power source. So, while you can magnetically attach it to the side of the e-reader, it doesn’t need that connection to juice up. The pen could be unattached for months and still work.

That’s pretty impressive when you consider all this pen can do. It’s got a high degree of pressure sensitivity, tilt recognition, and a newly redesigned eraser. In my experience, the latency was essentially zero. It kept up with fast and slow strokes.

It’s fun to use, and that big canvas cries out for an illustration. It’s also nice that the pen ships with the Kindle Scribe.

Battery life

Amazon Kindle Scribe is rated for 12 weeks of battery life, but that’s if you keep the WiFi off. Your battery life will also vary based on how often you use the lights to illuminate the reflective screen in the dark and how much you annotate your books. Still, battery life will invariably be “weeks” and not “days” or “hours” with a Kindle.

Unlike some of the smaller Kindles like the new Paperwhite and Colorsoft, the Scribe is not water resistant, so just keep that in mind if you take it to the pool or beach.