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Amazon is releasing its second-generation Kindle Scribe this morning, and I’ve been putting a review unit to the test for the past few days, comparing it to the original Scribe and the competing reMarkable 2, both of which I use regularly.

One of the new features is an AI summarization tool, so I wrote my review in the Kindle Scribe and had the device generate a recap from eight pages of handwritten notes. It turned out well enough that I feel comfortable pasting the AI-produced text below as an overview of my impressions, including pros, cons, and key takeaways.

This is unedited, as forwarded to my email as text from the device, so you can see how the text came through (including punctuation mistakes and other quirks). I summarized the overall eight pages of notes first, then did a separate AI summary of the key points from a subset of my two handwritten pages of takeaways.

Kindle Scribe Review: Pros and cons

• Enjoying the new active canvas feature that allows writing directly within the flow of a book and seeing all notes at once in the Annotation Notebook view
• At summarization feature is a positive change that affects how the user thinks about and links their notes
• Battery life is amazing. lasting over 70% charge after several days of heavy use
• The basic form factor hasn’t changed from the 2022 Scribe. allowing reuse of the same case
• Kindle integration provides a premier ebook ex­perience with easy book previews. purchases. and access to word definitions
  cons:
• Difficulty distinguishing the new pen from the ori­ginal. with similar weight distribution and feel
• Inadvertent triggering of the highlighter due to the pen button placement
• Occasional lag and pronounced screen refresh when using the lasso select tool
• Suboptimal placement of the toolbar icon
• Limited file management capabilities compared to the Remarkable device
• Dissatisfaction with the script font choices. pre­ferring more traditional typefaces

Overall, the Kindle scribe offers useful features and a great reading experience, but has some minor annoyances and limitations in file management that diminish the overall experience

-Key points:
-The scribe has useful features. but also some minor annoyances and limitations.
-The scribe’s integration with Kindle is a key differentiator.
-For reading books and writing. the scribe is the best choice. but for note-taking. the Remarkable may be a better option.
-The Scribe costs $399 with a premium marker that includes an eraser.
-Owners of the 2022 Scribe can get software updates for active canvas and Al summarization features.

That’s the end of the AI summary. It’s a pretty good overview of my thoughts. Going through this process made me realize how the AI basically fixes the problem of suboptimal optical character recognition on quirky handwriting. By comparison, the Kindle’s straight OCR translation of my notes is unreadable at times.

See separate PDFs of the AI summary and my original notes below.

Kindle Scribe AI summary review by GeekWire on Scribd

Handwritten Review by GeekWire on Scribd

Previous coverage:

• Amazon unveils first color Kindle, and new Kindle Scribe with ability to write directly in books
• Random thoughts on Amazon’s new Kindle Scribe
• GeekWire Podcast: Amazon devices chief Panos Panay on the color Kindle, AI, and his first year on the job
• From September: Challenged by Amazon, reMarkable unveils new ‘Paper Pro’ color tablet
• From 2022: Can the Kindle Scribe replace the yellow notepad? Notes on taking notes with Amazon’s new device