After 15 years, Amazon is finally letting you jot down notes on your Kindle. That’s right, the outfit’s newest E-ink device, the Amazon Kindle Scribe, comes with a stylus that lets you scribble notes onto the reader, essentially turning it into a reading and writing device.
Of course, this isn’t the first e-paper device to offer this functionality. We’ve seen numerous releases in that vein over the years, including Remarkable, Sony Digital Paper, and Kobo Elipsa, among others. However, if you’ve been locked into Amazon’s ebook platform and have no interest in moving elsewhere, being able to scribble notes on the same device you read books on was never an option until now.
The Amazon Kindle Scribe is larger than your typical Kindle, sporting a 10.2-inch Paperwhite display with a large bezel on one side, which should make it easy to hold while you read or write on the screen, complete with ambidextrous support (it works with both the bezel on the left or right side). The 16-level grayscale display boasts 300-ppi pixel density, which, the outfit claims, allow it to offer a satisfying experience for both reading and writing, as it’s able to retain the contrast and clarity found in previous Kindles while offering a larger display. The screen also gets a glare-free coating and adjustable front lighting, both of which should make it easy to use, regardless of the ambient lighting in your environment.
Of course, the big selling point here is the writing function, which is done using an included stylus that magnetically attaches to the edge of the device. With the stylus, you can use it as a freeform notebook, creating pages of notes to your heart’s content with a selection of preloaded templates like lined paper, grid paper, checklists, and more. You can also scribble notes directly on Kindle format AZW and AZW3 books, as well as PDF files, although you can only add sticky notes on other supported file formats. According to the outfit, however, writing notes is not available for manga books, magazines, and newspapers.
The Amazon Kindle Scribe also supports popular ebook formats like ePub and unprotected MOBI for both reading and writing sticky notes, as well as document formats such as DOCX, DOC, HTML, EPUB, TXT, RTF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP. It also supports AAX audibles for those who prefer audiobooks. For better accessibility, it has a VoiceView screen reader that provides text-to-speech functionality (only available in English, though), in case you’d rather have your books narrated while busy your eyes on something else.
It comes with three options in storage, 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB, so you can keep plenty of reading materials and personal notes on this thing. The onboard battery is rated at around 12 weeks, although actual use time will vary based on how often you read or write on the device. Suffice to say, it will probably take weeks between charges even for heavier users. Other features include dual-band Wi-Fi, five replacement stylus tips, and a 9W USB-C power adapter that lets you charge it to full in just 2.5 hours.
The Amazon Kindle Scribe is available now.
