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REVIEW

Kindle Scribe

Issue: 24.1 (January/February 2026)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 6,054
Starting Page Number: 12
Article Number: 24102
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If you'll recall, about a year ago I purchased a reMarkable 2 e-ink tablet and reviewed it for xDev. While impressive in parts, the whole was lacking, especially for the high price. At the time, I considered checking out Amazon's Kindle Scribe, which is similar, but it also seemed limited and was the same price, so I didn't bother.

This year, I discovered the Kindle Scribe was on sale for Christmas for a significant discount ($280 versus $420). I decided to try it, as with Amazon's holiday return policy, I have until January 31st to return it.

To my surprise, I love this e-ink tablet! First, it works just like a Kindle. But the bigger and higher-quality backlit screen makes reading much easier. While a smaller Kindle is more pocketable, reading is more of a chore as you have to turn pages far more often. Reading on the Scribe is much more like reading on a piece of paper. (You can set the "whiteness" of the "paper," which I found very handy as I didn't want it too bright or too yellow.)

Though I have several small Kindles, as well as Kindle apps on iPad and iPhone, I have found myself reading far more on the Scribe. I believe this is due to the size and improved readability. (You can, as with all Kindles, adjust the font and size of the text to your convenience.)

Second, because the Scribe includes a battery-free pressure-sensitive pen, it is very natural to use for writing, drawing, and marking up documents. Highlighting a text passage is trivial, for instance (simply draw across the lines with the pen). Doing that on a regular Kindle with your finger is somewhat cumbersome, and I tend not to do it as much.

(One bummer is that to get markable PDFs onto the device, you can't just upload them via USB—they must be sent to the device via Amazon's cloud to allow them to be marked up. I'm sure there's some technical limitation as to why, but this is not great for your personal/private PDFs, and it adds an extra step in the process.)

The pen works amazingly well, and writing/drawing is fluid. You are limited to shades of gray on a black-and-white Scribe, but for quick sketches, diagrams, and notes, that is more than sufficient.

While I haven't had this long enough to test it for software design, I think it would work well for sketching app interface ideas, writing notes, and making plans. You can create as many "notebooks" as you want, each with unlimited pages, so you could create ones for different types of projects. (For instance, I might use one for brainstorming for a novel I'm writing.)

My handwriting is terrible, so it is impressive that Scribe can read it. However, the implementation for doing this is very poor. First, it only works within notebooks—handwritten notes on a Kindle book or PDF cannot be converted to text.

Second, even in a notebook, you cannot just convert some selected writing. You must submit the entire page to the cloud, and Amazon then adds a new page to your notebook with the converted text!

This makes it very awkward for mixing text and sketches the way I would like (especially since I can't read my own handwriting), as your text would end up on a different page from your sketch. Lame!

(With the reMarkable 2 tablet, you could convert just a selected block of handwriting, and it would immediately turn it into a text block in the same place on the page.)

However, since this is still a new and developing platform and Amazon sounds committed to improving it, my hope is that they will fix this limitation with a software update. It seems very doable.

The tablet also has some other "AI" type features, such as summarizing your document. I was not particularly impressed with that since it involves sending the entire notebook to Amazon's cloud (which can take several minutes) and waiting for it to return with a summary. (The summary itself was fine, but I don't find summaries that useful.)

The organizational aspects of the Scribe software are also weak (similar to reMarkable 2). Exporting items off the Scribe is doable, but slightly clunky, and I would imagine that using this to manage hundreds of documents would be tedious.

Still, despite these limitations, I am impressed with the Kindle Scribe. As just a Kindle, it's expensive, though the high-resolution screen is almost worth it. Depending on how keen you are on handwriting notes and drawing, the device could be worth the extra money. Getting it 40% off on sale is a steal of a deal. I like mine (I've already read three books on it) and hope Amazon keeps improving the platform.

End of article.