My hand is cramping. It’s not carpal tunnel or some other dubious reason that’s causing the pain. It’s an analog ache that is oddly satisfying in a nostalgic way. In the last few days, I’ve held a pen and written more words for a much longer time than I have ever done in years. As I pushed myself to handwrite large parts of this review to spend more time with the 2024 Kindle Scribe’s stylus and note-taking tools, I started to feel a sensation I hadn’t remembered since my teens.
I often feel the urge to jot down thoughts and lists, but I never really wanted to spend longer than 15 minutes writing. And yet, Amazon’s new AI features for the Kindle Scribe seem to cater more to those who labor over essays or missives that they ultimately need to share with others. The Summarize and Refine tools for your notebooks, for example, can shorten and neaten up your scrawl so, I guess, you can send it to another person to read. That’s it, really. The other improvements to the Scribe’s writing experience are for scribbling on books, which I’ll get to in a bit.
What’s changed on the new Kindle Scribe
As I said earlier, most of what’s new on the Kindle Scribe is internal. On the outside, Amazon did tweak the bezels not in actual size but in colors, so that there’s a white rectangle surrounding the screen, within a teal green column on the side. If you opted for the “tungsten” version, then instead of teal green you’ll see dark gray. I love the new color, but it’s a bit confusing and makes me think the greppable area is narrower than before when in fact, it’s about the same. Still, this is a small complaint, if that, and one that is mostly mitigated by how fresh the new version looks.
The other main change is on the Premium Pen, which now has a rubberized top for its faux eraser. I’ve always appreciated how easy this was to use on the original Kindle Scribe, and I’m happy to report that the updated texture doesn’t get in the way of responsiveness. It certainly feels enough like erasers of my youth that every now and then I find myself subconsciously swiping away phantom dust. I will point out, though, that I had to remind myself to use the eraser on a few occasions, since I was more accustomed to simply striking out a mistake with the pen. The new Premium Pen also has a customizable shortcut button so long-pressing it can activate the highlighter, pen, marker, pencil, eraser, canvas or sticky note.
Drawing on books on the new Kindle Scribe
Finally, in addition to the two AI-related tools I already mentioned, Amazon also updated how you can write on ebooks. As I described in my hands-on in October, the new Active Canvas feature makes it so that once you put your pen on the page, a box will appear to contain your writing. Compared to the clunky implementation on the older model, which required you to first go to the floating toolbar on the left of every page, select the sticky note feature and then write in it, this seemed a huge improvement.
In my testing so far, though, this was less impressive. The software was buggy in my experience. On one occasion, I drew a spiral over the words “We had a good yarn about old times” in an Agatha Christie novel. A translucent box appeared, containing my drawing in a layer above the text, with a check mark and cross at the top. You’re supposed to tap the check, which will cause the box to fully solidify and the rest of the page’s words will rearrange themselves to make room. However, when I hit X by accident, the box didn’t go away, and I was able to continue to add doodles all over the screen. When I flipped to a different part of the book and came back, though, it disappeared, only to reappear later when I was trying to underline something.
That’s clearly just a bug, and when executed as intended, Active Canvas does work. You can resize the box, and lines will continue to reflow to make room or snap back into place. The boxes will stay where you left them, instead of disappearing under a little tag the way they did with the original Scribe. It’s a slight improvement, and though I can’t yet imagine how I’d use it in real life, it’s nice to know it’s there.
I do have to point out a couple of caveats, though. This doesn’t work on samples — you can tell whether the Active Canvas is supported by checking if the floating toolbox is present. The other issue, which is a bigger one, is that Active Canvas can sometimes be triggered even when you’re just trying to underline something. Drawing lines under or on text will generate underlines, which will be indexed by Amazon the same way highlights are, so you can easily find them again later on.
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