The Scribe has a terrific electronic-paper screen and stylus, but the iPad has a slightly larger screen with much higher resolution -- and color. It's also a full-on tablet, with all the capabilities therein. (Rick Broida/Yahoo)
Do you miss taking notes the old-fashioned way, with pencil and paper? Amazon's Kindle Scribe tablet is a terrific digital alternative, serving up any kind of "paper" you can imagine (college-ruled, sheet music, daily planner, etc.) on a spacious, eye-friendly screen. Paired with it: a comfortable stylus that lends the feel of writing on real paper. The 2024 Scribe builds on the successes of its 2022 predecessor — though not quite enough to justify a perplexing price increase, one that begs a question: Why not just buy a real tablet instead? More on that below in my Kindle Scribe (2024) review.
Related:
The best writing tablets for 2025, tested and reviewed (coming soon)
VERDICT: Though not a huge improvement over the original Scribe, it's a fine dedicated writing tablet overall — and a great option for readers seeking an oversize Kindle.
I think price is the elephant in the writer's room, so let's start there: The 2024 Scribe starts at $400. That does include the Premium Pen, but still nets you only 16GB of storage. The original Scribe was $340 with the now-discontinued Basic Pen, or $390 with the Premium Pen and 32GB.
For sake of proper comparison, the 2024 Scribe with 32GB sells for $420, a $30 increase. This despite the fact that Amazon made no meaningful changes to the hardware; it's not bigger, faster, brighter or anything like that. (And it's still grayscale, too, despite the arrival of Amazon's first color Kindle late last year.)
Instead, it has a "redesigned flush front," which simply means Amazon added a more visible bezel surrounding the screen (which only serves to make it look smaller, even though it's not). There are also some software upgrades (detailed below), but Amazon says those will be coming to the original Scribe in 2025.
Thankfully, like all Amazon-branded hardware, the new Scribe will see regular sale pricing. At this writing, for example, the 16GB and 32GB models are down to $325 and $340, respectively. (The top-end 64GB model lists for $450; it's currently $365.) Even if you don't see those discounted prices right now, stay tuned; they'll be back.
It's hard to say how much storage is "enough" for a device like this. Even 16GB is enough to hold thousands of books — but it'll start to run out more quickly if you download audiobooks. Similarly, digital notes are images, not simple text, so they eat up a bit more space as well.
As with any non-expandable digital device, it's a good rule of thumb to buy as much storage as you can afford.
But let's return to the tablet question: An Apple iPad 10.9 (64GB) and Apple Pencil (1st gen) would cost you about $450 at the Apple Store (though they're frequently discounted as well). It goes without saying that this combo affords a lot more capability than a Kindle Scribe; it's a full-blown color tablet, after all (and the one I consider the best iPad for most people).
However, you don't get nearly the same pencil-on-paper writing feel as you do on the Scribe, nor anywhere near the battery life: The iPad and Pencil need recharging after about 10 hours, while the Scribe can last for weeks (and its stylus doesn't need charging, period). And an iPad doesn't afford the same distraction-free writing (or reading) experience.
You can read a deeper dive into all this in my upcoming roundup of the best writing tablets. Spoiler alert: There's a pretty strong case to be made for the iPad option. I think the only real downside is the writing-on-glass feel.
If you've used a Kindle before, there's nothing too revolutionary here except for the screen size: It's a glorious 10.2 inches, which lets you see a lot more text at once. However, because that screen is wider and taller than most print books, I found that my eyes had a hard time adjusting to the extra movement. Thankfully, like all Kindles, the Scribe offers line-spacing and margin adjustments, which enabled me to create a more comfortable layout.
And it's an excellent option for those with eyesight issues: You can choose a large font size and still fit a lot of text on the screen. I do wish the device had physical page-turn buttons, though there's so much screen estate that swiping is hardly a hardship.
Landscape mode supports two-column viewing, a feature I've long enjoyed in the Kindle app for iPad. Unfortunately, you have to venture into layout settings to toggle between portrait and landscape; although the screen can auto-rotate 180 degrees, it can't do 90 degrees without manual intervention.
Whatever orientation you choose, the display delivers a crisp 300 pixels per inch (ppi), resulting in text that's virtually indistinguishable from print. Like most other Kindles, it includes a "warm light" option that softens the LED lighting to a more amber color, nice for evening reading.
The Scribe feels thin and lightweight when you pick it up, though it does tip the scale at just under a pound. (For the record, the aforementioned iPad 10.9 is just a hair thicker and heavier.) An entry-level Kindle, meanwhile, weighs only 5.5 ounces, so it's much easier to hold for long periods of reading. Although the Scribe has a roomy bezel on the side that makes for a fairly comfortable grip, I did find myself two-handing the device at times.
Of course, the Scribe isn't solely for reading; it's also for writing.
Before I tried the Scribe, my last effort at digital note-taking was on my PalmPilot PDA. Needless to say, this is better. Scribbling on the Scribe feel joyously paper-like — and it even sounds that way, too. There's zero lag between pen strokes and digital ink appearing beneath them; the overall experience perfectly emulates putting pencil to papyrus.
You're not limited to just blank sheets, either; the Scribe offers a generous assortment of templates, including numerous styles of lined paper as well as a dot grid, graph paper, sheet music, a checklist, day and weekly planners and more. (For anyone asking, "Why is this thing better than a pencil and $5 spiral notebook?", there's your answer: On a single device you can have 18 different kinds of notebooks, with enough storage to hold literally thousands of pages.)
The included Premium Pen is a plastic stylus that requires no batteries, no charging and no pairing; it just works. A strong magnet clips it to the side of the screen when not in use, but I could see it getting knocked loose in a purse or backpack — and felt growing concern about losing it, especially given that replacements cost $80.
There's a shortcut button you can configure to perform one of several possible actions when held down: highlighter, fountain pen, sticky note, eraser, etc. Speaking of which, the Premium Pen has an "eraser" embedded in the top, just like an actual pencil. I love this feature, but don't love the added resistance in this version: While it does feel more like you're using an actual rubber eraser, I found it easier and more comfortable to wipe away digital ink when it was slippery.
A small onscreen toolbar, which you can collapse when not needed, lets you choose between pen, fountain, pen, marker, highlighter and eraser modes, with a choice of five thicknesses for each of them — plenty for everyday note-taking. Nearly all these tools are pressure- and angle-sensitive, too: Lines get thicker when you press a little harder with the stylus or write at an angle.
So what can you do with notes after you've written them? As before, you can send any note via e-mail and have it converted to text (either a searchable PDF or a raw text file) along the way. (This process is more commonly known as OCR: optical character recognition.) In my tests this worked fairly well, but it's strange that there's no OCR option that keeps the converted text on the device. Actually, there is, but it's sort of hidden in the AI tools (see below).
Meanwhile, you can send just about any kind of file (PDF, Word document, image, etc.) to the Kindle via e-mail (it has a dedicated address) and then use the stylus to add notes. If you have a Microsoft 365 subscription, you'll find a "Send to Kindle" option in Word, with two available formats: one that lets you write directly on the page, one that limits you to adding virtual sticky notes.
One ongoing letdown here is that the Scribe can't sync with, say, a Google Drive or Evernote account. In fact, the only way for documents to get on or off the device is via e-mail; those you create on the Scribe are sent as PDFs. And speaking of syncing, any notations you add to an e-book on the Scribe can be viewed on Kindle apps.
As noted above, only the Scribe's exterior has changed (slightly); internally it's the same. However, Amazon did introduce some software upgrades, most notably a pair of AI-powered features: For any given page or notebook, you can request either an AI-generated summary or a "refinement". The former is pretty self-explanatory; it's basically a bulleted list of key takeaways, and it works pretty darn well.
A refinement aims to clean up whatever you've written (up to 10 pages at a time), turning it into neatly organized text. (This is basically the OCR I mentioned above.) I put this to the test using 10 pages' worth of podcast notes I'd recorded, and it did a surprisingly good job with both recognition and organization. (My handwriting is abysmal.)
Whichever AI tool you use, you can edit the results or add them as-is into the notebook. Very helpful.
Another welcome improvement is the option to add handwritten notes to just about any Kindle book, not just a tiny fraction of them like before. However, don't expect the kind write-anywhere annotating you can do on a PDF; instead, you simply start scribbling atop the text. When you're done, the note gets dumped into a "canvas" (basically a box) that stays where it is within the text, reflowing what follows. It's a little awkward, and doesn't allow things like circles or arrows, but it gets the job done. (Update, Feb. 17, 2025: A software update added the option of a pop-out margin column where you can more comfortably take notes, without interrupting the flow of text. I like this much better than the inline notes box, though that remains available for those who might prefer it.)
Competing writing-tablet devices like the Onyx Boox Note Air 4 C and Remarkable Paper Pro offer a bit more flexibility here, and color screens to boot. The former can even run Android apps, including Kindle. The Scribe makes document creation easy and, dare I say, fun, but still falls short on document markup, syncing and sharing.
What we have here, then, is a big e-reader that's also a writing tablet. Or maybe the other way around. But do these two halves, both of which have some limitations, combine to make a compelling whole?
I'm giving that a qualified yes. I really like the Scribe, limitations and all. If you're already invested in a Kindle library of e-books and want the largest available screen, there's no question it's a great — if expensive — choice. The pen makes for much easier highlighting/annotating than your finger (which is what's required on other Kindles), and you can use it to add inline handwritten notes as well.
As a digital notepad, the Scribe succeeds by keeping things simple. The stylus feels great in your hand and when applied to the screen. The AI tools are a nice new addition; I can see myself using them fairly often. But there's some hoop-jumping required to get documents on and off the device; I'd like to see solutions that don't involve e-mail.
Mostly I struggle with the iPad question: Except for the somewhat slippery writing feel, which I could probably learn to live with, it seems like the smarter buy. I think Amazon needs to give serious consideration to a lower price for the Scribe, because right now it feels like paying more and getting less.