Annotations On The Kindle Scribe Are Awesome…but There’s A Glaring Flaw

C. Scott Brown / Android Authority

Since its original launch in 2022, the Kindle Scribe has always been the odd man out in the Kindle line-up. It’s way larger than most Kindles, for one, but it also allows you to write notes using a stylus, a feature that fundamentally changes how a Kindle might fit into your life. In late 2024, the Scribe got its first hardware refresh, making it faster than ever. It also received an update that enhanced the Active Canvas feature, letting you make notes in existing documents and e-books.

Before this Active Canvas update, your notes in an e-book or document would be separate from the rest of the existing text. Now, though, they can appear right in the text itself, replicating the experience of actually writing directly onto the page of a real-life book. What’s more is that you can connect a note to a piece of text in the document, so that note will always be in the proper place, regardless of how you might change the font size or page layout.

Overall, this is a terrific feature that elevates the Scribe to new levels of usefulness. When I heard about it, I imagined myself reading a company press release and taking notes right on the page about things I want to test, mention in a review, or ask the PR rep for more clarity. After Amazon sent me a second-gen Scribe to try it out, I excitedly loaded a PDF onto it and tried to take some notes.

Unfortunately, the Active Canvas feature doesn’t support PDFs transferred with a USB cable. You also can’t download PDFs from the Scribe’s web browser. This sent me down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out what you can actually do with Active Canvas, and I have to say I am disappointed at how confusing and limiting it is.

Kindle Scribe Active Canvas: Powerful…when it works

C. Scott Brown / Android Authority

To test out a fully-featured Active Canvas session, I downloaded an e-book directly from Amazon’s store. There’s no way to tell what the format of that book is on the Scribe itself, but I figured if any e-book is going to work with Active Canvas, it would be one directly from Amazon.

Sure enough, when I opened the book, I found little tools all over the page. The collapsible toolbar on the left side (see photo below) shows various things I can do with the stylus, including making it work like a standard pen, a highlighter, an eraser, and more. I can also create new sticky notes, insert a new canvas, undo/redo actions, etc.

To no one’s surprise, Active Canvas works great for the e-books you get directly from Amazon.

With the pen tool activated, I don’t need to manually create a new canvas when I want to make a note. I can literally just start writing on the page anywhere that I please. When I’m finished, I can confirm that note, and it will become a square of text that is resizable but is also always connected to the place I made it. If I alter the book’s layout in any way, I won’t need to worry about finding that note because it will always be right next to that specific paragraph.

If I want to write lengthier notes, I can hit the margin icon at the upper right in the photo above. This opens up a writing space where I can write as much as I want, which might be more convenient than scribbling all over the page in certain situations. Once I save it, it will go into a list of notes I’ve made in this book. I can move the order of the notes around quickly or erase the ones I don’t want anymore.

It’s so nice just to start writing on the page without needing to create a sticky note or canvas first.

Everything I did here was very intuitive. The ability to just start writing on the page is a game-changer for sure, as it makes doing so much more similar to how it was way back in the day when I would do this in physical school books.

The problem, though, is that I can’t imagine too many situations in which I would want to do this in a book I downloaded from Amazon. What would be helpful would be having this ability with PDFs and other types of documents that either have been sent to me, or I’ve created myself. Unfortunately, that’s where the usability of Active Canvas falls apart.

A mess of format support ruins the experience

C. Scott Brown / Android Authority

I am a huge fan of Calibre, the free and open-source software that allows you to organize your e-book library exactly how you want, regardless of where you sourced your books. It allows you to, for example, buy an e-book from the Google Play Store, convert it to a different format, and then move it to your Kindle. Calibre is also really useful if you invested in buying an e-reader and e-books from an Amazon competitor — say Kobo, for example — and want to move your library of Kobo e-books to your new Kindle. On top of that, Calibre makes it dead simple to send non-book documents and files to your Kindle both through a USB cable or wirelessly and ensures they are converted to the proper format before getting there.

If you use Calibre, get ready to be extremely frustrated with the Kindle Scribe’s Active Canvas feature.

When I first got the Kindle Scribe, I used Calibre to send over a ton of e-books, PDFs, and other files by connecting it to my PC with a USB-C cable. Before sending them, I converted all the e-books to the EPUB format, which is what Kindles tend to work best with. To my dismay, all the books and PDFs I opened didn’t have the two toolbar icons you saw in the previous section. I also couldn’t just start writing on the page as I did with the book I got from Amazon directly. In fact, I couldn’t make any notes at all — just read.

These limitations ruin the very concept of why I would want to use a Scribe. I don’t want to think about what file types the Scribe supports and how I need to use a specific method to get my files there. I want to move a file in whichever way is most convenient to me and start making notes on it. It should just work.

Plenty of room for Amazon to do better

C. Scott Brown / Android Authority

I understand that the Kindle is a loss leader for Amazon. The company might be losing money on every Kindle it sells, but it’s OK with that because it knows it will make up for that lost cash through Audible subscriptions and e-book sales. Therefore, Amazon has no vested interest in allowing people to sideload documents and have as good of an experience with them as they would content purchased directly from its online store.

That makes sense for a standard Kindle — such as the amazing Kindle Paperwhite ($159.99 at Amazon), for example — because the sole reason you buy one is to read or listen to books. The Kindle Scribe ($419.99 at Amazon), though, is different. Because it also doubles as a note-taking device, it moves from being strictly for reading to becoming a productivity tool — and an expensive one, at that, with a list price starting at $400 and going as high as $450. If Amazon purposefully makes it less useful for productivity, the very essence of the product is ruined. Unfortunately, that’s what the company is doing.

A Kindle Scribe is just as much a productivity tool as it is an e-reader, but Amazon is purposefully nerfing the productivity side.

My partner is a scientist, and she also was very excited about the Scribe’s note-taking abilities. However, once she found out how limited it is, she balked. She can’t download scientific papers from the Amazon store, and Amazon won’t let her download PDFs from the web browser or even scribble on PDFs she sideloads. We were fully prepared to buy her a Scribe so she could stop using standard notepads, but we scratched that idea immediately.

The only potential good news here is that nothing is stopping Amazon from fixing this. It could remove all the arbitrary file format limitations described in the previous section or at least fix some of the most blatantly silly ones. A quick software update and poof: problem solved. Of course, my gut says that Amazon isn’t likely to do that, especially with the recent news that the company is removing the Download & Transfer via USB option from all Kindles, not just the 2024 models. It appears to want to make things even more closed down, not more open.

Regardless, if you were planning on buying a Kindle Scribe because you were under the impression that it allows you to scratch notes over anything you’re reading, it’s not that simple. You will need to have a specific document in a specific format obtained in a specific way for it to work as expected. That doesn’t mean the Kindle Scribe is a bad product, but it might not be the product you think it is. It certainly isn’t what I thought it was.

Amazon Kindle Scribe (2024)

Amazon Kindle Scribe (2024)

Large display • Great battery life • Stylus support • AI note taking

E-reader with premium stylus

E-readers are great for consuming books, an e-reader with a stylus becomes a powerful tool for classes or meetings. The Amazon Kindle Scribe 2024 is just that, a 10.2-inch anti-glare tablet with the Amazon Premium Pen stylus. Highlight your textbook, take notes, or just doodle for fun with up to 12 weeks of battery life.