Picked it up at my mail service this morning at 9:30 AM, dropped off at the UPS Store 23 mi away in town at 11:30 AM.
It felt too heavy—weirdly, it seemed as hefty as my previous iPad Pro 11 with worse balance
It felt too slick—difficult and uncomfortable to hold while reading (a skin or TPU back cover might alleviate that)
The screen was very noticeably more grey than my 2021 6.8” Paperwhite no matter how I adjusted the lighting
The text was not only less dark than said Paperwhite, it also looked a bit out of focus to my eyes
Margins in ebooks cannot be reduced as much, proportionally, as the said Paperwhite (Nathan at The Ebook Reader mentioned this as a negative)
Power button & USB-C port are on the side where you grip it; not a comfortable feel on my hand
Notetaking was fine and about as expected. Where it fails for me is in ergonomics and readability. I have gained a new appreciation for the 2021 6.8” Kindle Paperwhite, which I have been using again recently in anticipation of the Scribe.
I’m probably going to return mine as well. I was prepared for the weight and it is actually fractionally lighter than the Elispa, though the Elipsa may have better weight distribution.
Also agree about the relative “grayness” of the display. As i think I mentioned the Elipsa, while noticeably having less sharp text, OTOH also has obviously higher contrast generally.
I suspect that might be something that Amazon could tweak as I think it may be due to the antiglare treatment. The one niche area where the Scribe is noticeably more readable is in our harsh mixed light office courtyard, but under the rest of the office normal lighting, or at home, the Elipsa has superior contrast.
And FWIW, while I slightly prefer the Scribe’s deluxe pen, purely on physical feel, the Elispa’s pen software stack is most definitely superior.
You guys have successfully activated my gadget lust for an e-reader.
So I was wondering if I could get your expert opinions on readability of text-heavy PDFs. They are mostly two-column articles with some diagrams, tablets and illustrations, formatted for A4/Letter pages.
In your opinion, which of your e-readers would display that PDF with greatest clarity/least eye-strain? Would a sub-8" size be out of the question, and you’d recommend 10" at a minimum? How is the PDF rendering in general for large 100+ page documents (rendering slow downs, unicode/LaTeX character errors, etc.)?
Initial answer from Amazon when we asked yesterday was no as supporting the various pen interfaces on various devices would be a very large task. OTOH I could see them doing it in phases, likely starting with the iPad as they mentioned yesterday that iPad represent the majority of Kindle use, even greater than their own e-readers.
That’s actually a fairly complex question to answer as you have the multiple variables of screen type and size, complexity (or lack thereof) as well as perhaps most importantly the software involved.
To that end, we actually still generally recommend either an iPad in most cases or secondarily a Galaxy Tab, primarily because they can run Acrobat and other apps specifically designed for that purpose.
So that all being said, I think for most people it would also have to factor highly as an actual e-reader, and as I said, I think the Scribe is the best Kindle to date.
For my own use with PDFs which are primarily our own technical docs and customer user manuals the Kobo at least as of today still has much better software. However , and the call we had yesterday further confirmed it, Amazon will rapidly evolve/improve the software.
That being said the Elipsa has noticeably higher contrast, whereas the Scribe has noticeably sharper text. so It would depend on what you are most sensitive to and/or value.
The Boox and some of the other e ink devices running Android hold promise since they could run things like Acrobat for instance, but to date the apps haven’t been designed/optimized for e-ink and the “stock” apps on things like the Boox were fairly primitive the last time I tried them.
PS: The one thing I can definitely declare though is that the standard kindle screen size is too small for anything other than general content review. If you need to see things like formatting and layout, you need at minimum a 10 inch display IMHO
I was also thinking that they could make the Scribe functions available on the app for those that had a Scribe registered to their Amazon account. But then I started thinking that itmight violate the different OS privacy ToC.
I didn’t either, but again it shows me that e-ink is still a niche in the overall market whereas Apple has been flogging the market with iPads for more than a decade
PS: they did mention that two page view in landscape orientation is coming to the Scribe next spring in an update. Apparently, there is an extra level of complexity to do it “properly” with e-ink that isn’t present in conventional LCD technology
Making in-app note-taking only available to apps which are linked to accounts which have a Kindle Scribe seems the best compromise.
Surprised that Landscape mode is a problem — landscape orientation books display fine thus — curious what the difficulty is.
Anyway, I posted my (5 star) review:
The best Kindle yet (incredibly fast and responsive), and one which adds the ability to take notes, and write and sketch in notebooks which may be exported and shared as PDFs, and which synch to the Kindle App (being able to refer to them on-demand and at-need on one’s phone is _incredible).
Note that one must use “Send to Kindle” to get PDFs added in such a fashion that they may be written/drawn on.
Features which I hope are added (and which will make it perfect):
chisel-edge/italic line option (ideally w/ user-controllable width and angle)
handwriting recognition
export of notebooks as vectors/strokes (currently they are a 1860x2480 pixel image)
ability to run 3rd party apps such as Autodesk Sketchbook and Nebo.app
EDIT: I also received the Amazon fabric cover — it’s nice, but I can see the criticisms (magnets only holding device, minimal side/edge protection, loop is not elastic and won’t fit 3rd party pens) — kind of wishing I’d gone for leather or the premium leather case option.
Despite all the shortages and it being in the heat of the holiday shopping rush, you can still order any variation of Kindle Scribe you wish and receive it by the 15th. And the ratings…
… That’s the average for all variants. For comparison last year’s 6.8” Kindle Paperwhite has a 4.7 out of 5 average and you can’t get one till the 16th. Just in case you’re thinking, “well, at that high price, of course,” the Kindle Oasis ($279, smaller, no pen or notetaking) gets a 4.6 out of 5 rating and can’t be delivered until the 19th at the earliest, mid-Jan if you want no ads + Kindle Unlimited. Neither are new, latest greatest items like the Scribe.
Something tells me Amazon isn’t happy with the Scribe’s reception.
Edit: a more direct comparison: the Kobo Elipsa gets 4 out of 5 on Amazon.
Interestingly, even the 1-star reviews seem to all praise the hardware, so it’s just a matter of getting the software updated and determining what software features need to be added and adjusting the product pages so that they communicate what the machine does in a way that people will understand and accept before purchasing.
Bizarre that some folks complain it’s too large.
Rough way to do market research, but it seems to me that Amazon should be able to identify the biggest complaints and the most desired features and then should be in a pretty good position.
So apparently I’m not the only one having significant issues with the send ePubs to Kindle function. OTOH there are some good suggestions in this thread, but many have had the same experience I’ve had which is a failure message, but with no guidance as to why it failed.
And to be clear, in my case, it’s not just our own internally produced epubs, but "official’ ones from sources such as Tor and Humble Bundle which FWIW also have no issues on Nooks, Kobos, or the Apple book app
I took a quick look at the Kindle Scribe firmware to see what is different from previous models. As far as I can tell the handwritten annotation features are tightly tied to KFX format. The kfxreader application was changed significantly. The templates for notebooks, like checklist and daily planner, are single page KDF documents (KFX in an SQLite wrapper) containing KVG (Amazon’s proprietary version of SVG) images.
I’d love to have a converter to get the KVG images converted into SVG (and maybe back), esp. if the annotations are stored thus — getting a transparent pixel image is not exactly optimal.
Agreed. BTW. I strongly suspect that they are doing it the way they are to enable /ensure compatibility with the standard Kindles which essentially just ignore the annotations.
