As both a large-screen ereader and a digital notebook, the Scribe’s interface is broken up into a few purpose-focused tabs. The Home tab shows a preview of your latest quick notes and a list of your most recent notebooks and documents, while scrolling down reveals rows of recommended books from the Kindle store.
(Credit: Will Greenwald)
The Library tab is your Kindle library, which can be overwhelming if you have many books or if you’re in a Prime household with a lot of readers. Filters help wrangle it a bit, letting you see only certain types of files, like books or imported documents, or what’s currently downloaded to the device. You can also manually set up your own collections, which helps further.
As an Amazon device with Kindle in its name, the Kindle Scribe is built around Amazon’s services like the Kindle Store, Kindle Unlimited, and Audible to purchase and access anything to read. This isn’t a problem if it’s where all your ebooks live. Some library systems that host digital collections let you link your Amazon account so you can check out and read library books on the Scribe. If you want to import your own ebooks, however, things get complicated.
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There are a few ways to add non-Amazon ebooks to your Kindle library. There’s the Send to Kindle web tool with a 200MB maximum file size, a Send to Kindle desktop application for PC and Mac, and a Send to Kindle Chrome extension. You can also email files directly to your Kindle with its own unique email address, and, if you have a Microsoft Office 365 subscription, you can send Word documents to your Kindle. Finally, you can simply plug the Kindle into your computer and transfer your files via USB. In addition to Amazon’s Kindle formats, the Kindle Scribe supports unprotected MOBI, PRC, PDF, and TXT files. You can convert DOC, DOCX, EPUB, HTML, and RTF files to the proper format by sending them to the Kindle.
(Credit: Will Greenwald)
This sounds like a wealth of options, and it mostly is. For my library ebooks and comics, culled from sources such as Humble Bundle, the Internet Archive, and Project Gutenberg, it can be a pain. First, the Send to Kindle web tool has a file size limit of 200MB, the desktop app has a perplexingly smaller limit of just 50MB, and you can’t feasibly email files nearly that size, so I can’t use those methods to transfer and convert Image comic collections from Humble Bundle or video game map books from Retro Games Books. File format support is also inconsistent, depending on the tool or transfer method you use.
For text-heavy novels from Delta Green and The Murderbot Diaries, sending them as EPUB files through the web and desktop apps worked fine, and they opened and scrolled as they should. However, trying to send them as MOBI files gave me an error. Copying Video Game Maps: SNES (Volume 2) as a MOBI file over USB worked, and the document opened, but the art-heavy book clashed with the Kindle’s text layout, making it difficult to read. While you’re mostly able to load your content onto the Kindle Scribe, you might have to experiment with the file format and transfer method before finding success. Meanwhile, ereaders like the Onyx Boox Go 10.3 and Kobo Elipsa 2E have much wider file compatibility and more options for using libraries’ OverDrive-powered ebook collections.
(Credit: Will Greenwald)
As a monochrome ereader, the Kindle Scribe doesn’t have color, as the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft does. This makes it less than ideal for reading comics or books with color graphics. However, for monochrome-friendly content, the Scribe is nicer on the eyes than the Colorsoft. As mentioned, the neutral background of the grayscale E Ink screen is lighter and easier to read without the frontlight than the Colorsoft’s color E Ink screen, and is just as sharp. For monochrome content, the Scribe is simply superior to its more expensive sibling.
