The return of the Jedi, The return of the king. Somehow it feels like all third instalments feature the return of … something. Why should my epic journey in e-paperland stray from that path: it”s time for “The return of the Kindle”.
Yes, more then a 1,5 year after I stuffed my un-used (slightly cracked) Kindle Oasis into a drawer, saying sayonara to Amazon’s walled of bookstore ecosystem, a new Kindle has arrived on my doorstep. The Kindle Scribe ( the XL-Oasis as my wife calls it) is a work of art.
Hardware: The metal casing makes the Kindle feel cool in your hands and comfortable to hold. The larger bezel on one side (on the right) gives the device a ‘primary’ orientation (that you can also refer to as the “down” side if reading in portrait mode). The display has a premium quality and writing on it with the stylus gives you very nice experience. I personally opted for the premium pen (with the eraser on the back) and switching the note taking setting to ‘fountain pen’ has resulted in my scribbles being not only readable but also aesthetically pleasing to look at. After decades of writing on a screen this is the very first device that has allowed me to do that.
Software; The Scribe has come a long way. Annotating Ebooks is not an option like it was with the Kobo Elipsa. You can add a tiny post-it note to your sentence and scribble something, after which the Scribe leaves a tiny post-it note for you to go back to. But, when annotating PDF’s doodling on pages IS an option and it is FAST.
Your own written notes can be exported via PDF without a lot of hassle.
Sideloading epubs to the Kindle is a breeze with the Kindle app, allowing me to quickly pull a pdf, epub or mobi from my Calibre library and shove it to my Kindle document.
Compared to the Elipsa 2, the Kobo feels like the first generation prototype of a promising but premature kickstarter. It”s incredible how “different” both devices feel both in use and in consistency and stability of software. Maybe the feature-set of the Kindle Scribe lacks the “annotating epub” option that the Elipsa has, but this is something I would gladly trade in when I remember how unstable and unreliable the Kobo was.
When push comes to shove, the Kindle is a great device that is not pretentious when it comes to what it wants to be. A damn good ebook reader that lets you take notes. It’s not an iPad, It’s not a Remarkable. It stays true to what Kindle’s where set out to do. Offering you a premium experience in handling digital paper.
