Enlarge / Amazon’s Kindle Scribe e-reader. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
Amazon’s Kindle e-readers have been around for 15 years, and they’ve remained steadfastly focused on displaying books for reading (and, to a lesser extent, audiobooks). Input has never been something they’ve been particularly concerned with. The devices’ poky processors and laggy touchscreen keyboards are best suited for short annotations or looking up the name of a book or author—not for writing anything longer than a sentence or two, and certainly not for taking notes or jotting down idle thoughts.
That’s the main change to the Kindle Scribe, the newest and most expensive member of the e-reader family. It’s the first Kindle with its own purpose-built pen accessory and a 10.2-inch screen that’s more suitable for input than the 6-to-7-inch screens on other Kindles. It doesn’t come cheap—it starts at $340 and goes up quickly from there. It’s over three times as