Amazon’s Kindle Scribe Bet that Handwriting is the Future of E-Readers

With the Kindle Scribe, Amazon is hoping that a device it launched during the George W. Bush administration can be its next big thing again.

Amazon doesn’t shy away from flashy ideas, whether it’s a delivery drone, robotic sentry or a conversation with virtual assistant Alexa. But this week, Amazon started selling its Kindle Scribe, a refreshed version of the E Ink reader first launched back before Amazon even had a mobile app.

The Kindle Scribe isn’t futuristic. It isn’t semi-sentient. It doesn’t even have color. Its big update: In addition to reading, you can write on it now too. 

Read more: Amazon Kindle Scribe Review: This Note-Taking E Ink Tablet Strikes a Great Balance

But by rejuvenating the low-frills Kindle, Amazon is hoping to give you new reasons to experience the centuries-old joy of reading. The first Kindle launched the same year as the first iPhone, and in the decade and a half since, our personal devices have grown smarter, faster, flashier — and now exert a greater influence on our mental well-being. Swimming against this tide, the Kindle Scribe’s mission is unglamorous. It’s engineered to help you get deep into tasks undermined by most internet-enabled devices: attentive reading and note-taking. 

“We’ve expanded the world of what customers can do but still kept this idea of a sanctuary where people can get into the content and not be distracted,” Kevin Keith, Amazon’s vice president of product management and marketing, said in an interview. 

The Scribe’s real advance may simply be that Amazon, the world’s fourth biggest company by market value, is making it. 

Kobo, reMarkable and Boox E Ink tablets from smaller makers already offer writing as a feature, and some have large formats with screen quality nearly as good as the Scribe’s. But none let you mark up Kindle books, and some don’t even support the Kindle app. With the Scribe, Amazon has opened up its vast and popular library to your scribbling.

Adding a new sparkle to the Kindle experience makes sense, given that Keith says Amazon’s customers buy more Kindle books than physical books. And there’s a large potential base of future Kindle users who already use Amazon’s e-reading app. The Kindle app has been downloaded more than 326 million times globally since 2012 onto Apple and Android devices instead of Kindles, according to data.ai, a market analytics company that tracks mobile apps. 

The company sees the device “as a new category of Kindle that adds writing to everything customers love about Kindle today and opens us up to new and different customers,” Keith said.

Chris LaBrutto, a principal product manager at Amazon, said Kindle users were already creating a “Cliff Notes” version of their Kindle books with highlights and typed notes. Adding a stylus to write on the Scribe elevates that experience, letting readers get more actively engaged, LaBrutto said.

The question is whether, after 15 years of rising smartphone addiction, gadget buyers like you are longing to return to reading and writing in shades of gray.

E Ink’s fans like its limitations

First sold as part of e-readers in the mid-2000s, E Ink screens have earned devoted admirers from readers of all genres. The displays render text and graphics in gray scale with tiny, charged capsules that turn either black or white in response to negative or positive electric signals. They draw far less power than a traditional tablet, giving them battery lives measured in weeks instead of hours. 

You can also read an E Ink display in direct sunlight and avoid shining blue light into your eyes, because it isn’t backlit. That immediately appealed to Nick Price, a security engineer in Portland, Oregon, who’s used a number of Kindles with E Ink, as well as a Boox e-reader.

“I found it was a lot easier on my eyes in the evening when I’m trying to go to bed,” Price said of his first Kindle’s screen.

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For aficionados, the simplicity of the devices are the point….