Why Amazon’s Kindle Scribe Isn’t Worth It

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about my discovery that Amazon was releasing a brand-new Kindle model, called the Scribe. To say I was excited would be an understatement. Firstly because it’s been about six years since the Oasis (the last flagship device) came out, and secondly because the Scribe would offer what no other Kindle has before: the capacity for handwritten annotations. Unfortunately, I don’t think the Scribe is going be worth its hefty $340/£330 price tag. (Especially if you’re British - selling at almost the same figure in pounds AND dollars feels very unfair...) I should start by making it clear that this isn’t a straightforward device review, the way I reviewed my Kindle Oasis. That’s mostly because I don’t have a Scribe. What this is, is a kind of roundup/discussion of multiple other reviews on various tech or consumer websites, paired with my own fairly long-term experience of Kindles in general. I first started reading on the Kindle Keyboard circa 2010. Then I had the Basic, played around with a Paperwhite, and finally bought the Oasis. While I love the Oasis - it’s pretty much the perfect e-reader to me - I’ve long wanted the ability to actually write on the pages of an e-book. I read a lot of ARCs which require detailed reviews, plus I just naturally enjoy jotting my thoughts down on the page as I go along, and laboriously typing them out as a sticky note takes way too long. So the Scribe should be perfect, right? No, because YOU CAN’T ACTUALLY WRITE ON THE SCREEN! I was astounded when I learnt this: when they refer to marking up/annotating e-books, what Amazon means is that you can open up a sticky note label, handwrite into that , and then tuck it away. You aren’t writing on the page. You’re still relying on a sticky note which has to be expanded before you can view its content. This might sound like a meaningless distinction to you, but hear me out. E-ink screens are already slow, and adding an extra tap before you can see your note will definitely add up over time. I also think it disrupts the process a little bit more; you can’t just grab the pen and start scribbling anywhere on the page, you have to pick an actual word or sentence to which you want to attach the note. I love just circling and underlining things, but this is absolutely not the same experience. Admittedly you can directly mark up certain PDFs, so if that’s all you’re reading, okay. But the actual functionality of reading PDFs on Kindles is not great. The reason for the Scribe’s 10.2-inch screen is so you shouldn’t have to zoom in, but if you do have to, you’re pretty much stuffed; you can’t set every page to be zoomed in, necessitating constant pinching as you move along a document, and you can’t reflow the text to make reading easier. The Scribe also reportedly struggles...

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