Since its release in November, Amazon’s Kindle Scribe (aka, the first Kindle you can write on) has been perfectly fine for journaling and other casual notetaking, but basically impractical for serious work.
One of the main reasons: the inability to move and organize pages inside a digital notebook. If you didn’t create the pages in the notebook and in the order you ultimately wanted them, sorry, you were out of luck.
Amazon started to solve that problem Monday with an update that added, among other features, a “Notebook Overview” mode.
This new mode, accessible from the top menu bar inside Kindle Scribe notebooks, shows nine pages at a time on the Scribe’s 10.2-inch E-Ink display, letting users move pages around inside notebooks. It also lets users add new pages anywhere inside a notebook, not just at the tail end, as was the case before.
I’ve been testing it on my Kindle Scribe after manually updating my device Monday afternoon, and the new feature works well, as far as it goes. Select a page in the Notebook Overview mode, press the “Move” icon, and a series of vertical lines appear between the pages to allow you to choose where to put the page.
But it’s still not possible to move pages to a different notebook on the device.
The ability to move pages not just inside a notebook but also to other notebooks is one of the features of the competing reMarkable 2 tablet, which remains superior to the Kindle Scribe for notetaking in a variety of ways. Those advantages include the reMarkable’s accompanying smartphone and desktop apps that make it easy to sync and access notes.
ReMarkable also offers a handy cut-and-paste tool that lets users select their scribbles and move them around on the page, or to another page, even one in a different notebook.
In message to customers on Monday, Amazon signaled that it will be making progress on this front, as well, listing these features as coming soon: “New lasso select tools. Simply circle around a word or paragraph to move, cut, paste, and scale your notes. Convert to text feature. Convert, edit, and send your handwritten notes to yourself, friends, or colleagues.”
Other features in this week’s Amazon update include the ability to send documents directly to the Scribe from Microsoft Word. (I haven’t had a chance to test this capability yet.)
ReMarkable has been moving ahead with its own advances, including the integration of typed text, which dovetails with a recently released Typle Folio keyboard attachment.
But in the meantime, Amazon’s Kindle Scribe is vastly superior to the reMarkable 2 for e-book buying and reading, which was improved in the latest Scribe update with the ability to put two book pages side-by-side in landscape mode.
There’s also the fact that the Kindle Scribe has a lighted screen, which the reMarkable 2 does not. And the Kindle Scribe’s battery life is noticeably better than the reMarkable 2 in my experience.
Using both the Kindle Scribe and reMarkable 2, I often find myself wishing there was a way to blend the best of both. While it still has lots of room to improve for notetaking, Amazon’s new updates are a step in that direction.
