The Amazon Kindle Scribe was very clearly a first-gen device when it launched in late 2022, with hardware flaws and limited productivity software. Amazon patched it over the next year with useful fixes, but the fundamental problems remained. Now, the Kindle Scribe 2024 fixes nearly every complaint I had with its predecessor.
Amazon announced four new Kindles on Wednesday, including its first color e-ink Kindle. But its newest Scribe stands out for me thanks to one feature: Active Canvas. Essentially, you can now write directly on e-books and have the notes stay attached to the text, even if you resize the font or change the layout.
In my Kindle Scribe (2022) review, I complained that the only way to annotate e-books was to tap next to a word to create a little footnote icon and then write your notes in a pop-out box. Those notes weren’t visible unless you expanded them, and they covered up half of the screen.
Compared to underlining and marking up your school textbooks and novels in the margins, it felt extremely limited. At the time, I wished Amazon would let us lock an e-book into PDF format to enable notes.
It turns out Amazon took this criticism and enacted a much smarter solution with Active Canvas. As you can see in the photo above, you can write a note that reflows the book text itself and resizes it if you change the font size, so it’s always anchored to that part of the text.
You can also underline and highlight text using the pen for the first time, which is a simple necessity for me. Plus, you can open a collapsable marginal column on any page and take full-sized notes, then hide the column — though this feature won’t go live until 2025, according to Amazon. It’s not quite as natural as writing in the margins, but it also gives you more space, so I won’t complain.
Amazon wants the Kindle Scribe to be a note-taking tablet for students and professionals. The second-gen Kindle Scribe is “AI-powered,” letting you “quickly summarize pages and pages of notes into concise bullets in a script font that can be easily shared—directly within the notebook tab.”
I personally would prefer a standard Android tablet for note-taking; I like working directly in app suites like Google Drive or Microsoft Office instead of having to export notes. But Amazon’s smarts revamp is a welcome one regardless. I complained about the 1st-gen Scribe’s “slow response time” for most tasks, and this AI boost gives me hope that the next version is a bit faster.
Plus, the Kindle Scribe 2024 design looks more attractive. I complained about the “massive bezel” on the first Scribe, but this design has shrunk it to a more manageable size that’ll be easier to grip while adding new white borders along the edge that give it a distinct appearance from other Kindles.
The 300 ppi display and 16GB to 64GB of storage are the same, but it comes with a Premium Pen by default, and the Scribe has new fun color options to give it more personality. Unfortunately, it also costs more than the original Scribe—$399.99 and up—but now it feels like it earns that higher price tag.
Over Prime Day, I wrote about how my fiancee stole my Kindle Scribe to read e-books on a larger screen and that I wanted to buy a new one for myself despite its failings. Now, I’m ready to return that Scribe and shell out full price for the Amazon Kindle Scribe (2024) once it arrives on December 4. It could very well be one of the best e-ink tablets we’ve seen.
Amazon Kindle Scribe (2024)
Take notes freely
The Amazon Kindle Scribe (2024) has a 10.2″ glare-free, 300 ppi front-lit display and comes with a Premium Pen that requires no charging and feels like you’re sketching with a pencil. Now you can annotate your full library of Kindle e-books, keeping track of your thoughts for future tests or meetings.