The Kindle Scribe is a useful, efficient eInk tablet for handwriters.
The Kindle Scribe is a black and white e-reader and digital notebook, which comes with a pen that can be used to handwrite. You can read or write on it, and when reading you can even write in the margins or around the text. You can organize your notebooks into variously named folders. In addition, you can convert your handwriting into text via the share functionality.
I was originally going to buy another e-Ink tablet, but I ended up with the Scribe after perusing a few reviews comparing several tablets. My main reason to get it was that I was sick of having to type up all of these different notebooks when I wanted to edit my work. I’ve had it for over a year now, and I have finished a few things I probably wouldn’t have otherwise written.
I travel everywhere with my Kindle Scribe! I have a ton of different notebooks, and use them for my writing projects. I write mainly using handwriting, so it’s very nice to have something that can hold all of my projects together. Beforehand, I would have a whole bunch of different paper notebooks, which was certainly an inconvenience.
The pen feels incredibly nice and smooth to use, and it almost feels exactly like a physical notebook when writing. The navigation is quite simple, as well as most of the layout of the Scribe.
The biggest thing I wanted to know was how the handwriting to text worked. Was it good, did it make sense, could it parse my cursive… I handwrite almost entirely in cursive, so text conversion is usually pretty bad when I try to use it. Well… I can confidently say that the Kindle Scribe converts cursive to text with very good accuracy! There are some minor hiccups, but it’s overall quite a good converter.
The conversion works via sharing and sending with e-mail to your associated Amazon e-mail. You can either share quickly, or convert to text and share. When you convert to text and share, the Kindle parses your work and sends an e-mail after a few minutes containing two attachments: the original handwriting as a pdf, and searchable, with highlightable areas for your writing; and a text file with the converted writing. Open that up in a text editor of choice and you’re good to go!
I don’t have any major gripes with this product. It’s simple, convenient, unobtrusive, and efficient. If you’re insane like me and write via hand (including in cursive or not), I would highly recommend it!