I always regretted not buying the Kindle DX, for its big e-ink screen, so when the Kindle Scribe came out I was tempted. But I already had a Boox Note 2 (“BN2”), which does all the same things and much more besides, being an Android e-ink tablet rather than just an ereader. So I didn’t buy a Scribe until its second edition came along, it was on sale, and I was offered a substantial discount in return for trading in my Kindle Oasis. The Oasis was nice to read on in summer, but it got too cold on winter nights, so off it went.
The most important aspect of any ereader is the screen, and the clarity of text, and on the Scribe text looks pristine at larger sizes, backlight on or off, and also at smaller sizes in two columns to create a more bookish reading experience. Comics look terrific too, especially if you pick out a black-and-white book with nice square panels, or with a small enough page size to be readable a page at a time. I’ve read dozens of manga books this year as a direct result (the highlights have been Nina the Starry Bride, Witch Hat Atelier and Space Brothers).
As an ereader, then, I love it, though not unreservedly. As your only ereader, its weight can become an issue – my hands began to ache after a while – and it’s far too big and fancy to read at the bus stop (though I have taken it to the pub lots of times). I miss the home button from the BN2, and the page-turn buttons from the Kindle Oasis. You can remove white borders on some fixed-format books, but not always, and it’s unreliable: in manga books it crops off part of the picture too often to be useful.
Then we get to the reason it is called the Kindle Scribe: you can write on it, with a stylus. I bought the 64GB edition that came with the Premium Pen, which has an eraser and a customisable button, which I have set to highlight. The pen is a good one, nice to hold, and works with my BN2 as well, while the BN2 pencil works with this in return. I love writing on the Kindle Scribe screen: it has a bit of drag that’s not there on the BN2 or an iPad. Unlike the BN2, you cannot connect bluetooth keyboards and page turners to the Scribe for typing and navigation.
You can use the pen for writing in ebooks (including personal documents), annotating pdfs and writing in notebooks. At first I was enthusiastic about all three. In fact I used it for annotating an entire ebook I was working on, but that turned out to be a miserable mistake, the notes exporting in a way that made it very difficult to work from them. Now I only really use the sidebar, for quick notes on story submissions, which at least show up on the iPad app and can be worked through there.
Annotated pdfs look pretty good on the Kindle Scribe, but the pdfs export with each page and its annotations as one picture, so you can’t work through the annotations in say Adobe Reader. Fine, I thought, I’ll go back to the old British Standard proofreading marks, draw on the proofs I’m checking, put annotations in the margins. The only colour is black, but it was just about okay. Except that if you switch to landscape view on a page, the pdf exports with that page awry and the annotations out of line.
I delayed this review, assuming that something so basic would quickly be fixed, but so far it has not. If you want something to annotate pdfs on, avoid the Kindle Scribe.
I have more positive things to say about the notebooks, even though they are extremely rudimentary compared to the BN2, with few options and no colours (although the BN2 has a grey screen, you can choose to draw in colour and it will be visible on export). And yet I have used it much, much more for handwritten note-taking than either the BN2 or the iPad, e.g. after watching a film, or during meetings, or making a nightly to-do list for the next day. Perhaps the lack of options makes it easier to get started.
Another reason is that I’m always reading on it, so it’s always nearby, ready for notes, and the pen clips magnetically to the Scribe, so that’s always handy too. Plus, the fact that you can’t do anything else on it other than read and make notes means I use it to read and make notes. It has one advanced feature: it can convert your notes to plain text and email them to you, as I did with the notes for this review. The handwritten text in pdf exports of your notebooks is searchable, which impressed me.
Was it worth trading in my Kindle Oasis and paying £200 extra to get this? Yes, definitely, I use it constantly – although I probably do need a Kindle with a normal-sized screen too to complement it. It’s got me reading, and it’s got me writing. I love it, and I love it more the further I get away from the miserable mistake of having used it to annotate a book for work. The BN2 beats it in dozens of ways, but it also has a better – and hence more diverting! – browser, plus a full range of Android apps. Like the Freewrite, the Kindle Scribe can’t do much, so it keeps me focused on the things it can do. Stephen Theaker ****
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