Amazon's Kindle Scribe lets you mark up e-books with a stylus

You’ve always been able to read e-books on Kindles, but what if you could write on them, too?

That’s the question Amazon is trying to answer with the new Kindle Scribe, a $340 e-reader that’s launching this holiday season. It's a good deal more expensive than even the most recent $250 Kindle Oasis, but there’s a reason for that: Kindle Scribe comes with a built-in stylus that you can use for annotations and even journaling. 

The device looks like a Kindle Oasis overall, but with a stylus that docks on the right side of the display. And like other Kindles, its battery can apparently last for weeks at a time without charging.

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Kindle Scribe has a front-lit, 10.2-inch paperwhite display that looks as premium as you can get with the Kindle line. Amazon emphasized in its announcement that writing on the screen with the stylus feels like writing on paper but, of course, we’ll have to wait until it’s in our hands to judge if that’s true.

As for the actual uses of the stylus that justify the Kindle Scribe's high cost, there’s a lot more here than just marking up pages in books. You can send Word documents and PDFs to the device from a phone or computer, and mark them up. A software update coming in early 2023 will introduce the ability to send docs from the device to Microsoft Word, too.

Overall, the new Kindle Scribe fits right into a recent trend of giving tech-savvy folks more ways to bring books into their lives. Spotify now has audiobooks and TikTok’s popular #BookTok community has inspired the creation of an official TikTok book club.

Kindle Scribe definitely still looks like an e-book-first device, but adding all these annotation features with a built-in stylus could draw in people who lead tablet-centric lives.

Except, you know, they’ll be enriching their brains with e-books instead of watching YouTube videos.