Amazon has updated its large-screen Kindle Scribe ereader with a sleeker design and a slightly bigger screen, but not much else. The 2024 Kindle Scribe ($399.99) was already a sharp, easy-to-read tablet with useful note-taking features. Although the 2025 model carries over most of these capabilities and provides a compelling writing experience, at $499.99 (or $429.99 for the version without a front light), it doesn't introduce new features that might help justify the price increase. It is a capable reader and digital notebook for those locked into Amazon's sphere, but the Kobo Elipsa 2E ($399.99) is less expensive and supports a larger selection of content from outside sources, so it remains our Editors' Choice. If you want a color note-taking experience, the Onyx Boox Note Air 4C ($529.99) is our top pick thanks to its terrific screen and broad file support.

Design: Now More iPad-Shaped

The Kindle Scribe joins its Colorsoft sibling in embracing a clean, iPad-like design. Unlike the large, grip-like side bezel of its predecessor, the current model has a single, flat face, with its E Ink screen evenly framed by a 0.4-inch white band. It’s a clean look, and even without a thicker side bezel to grip, I didn’t accidentally tap anything on the screen with my thumb while holding it (and I have big thumbs).

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Dark gray metal wraps around the edges and back of the Scribe to form its casing, with four small rubber feet on the corners of the back panel for placing it quietly on a desk or table so it doesn’t slide once it’s set down. The right edge features a power button and a long, subtle notch in which the included Premium Pen stylus attaches magnetically. The bottom edge holds a USB-C port for charging and connecting to a computer. The whole package measures 9.6 by 7.4 by 0.21 inches (HWD) and weighs 14.1 ounces, or 1.2 ounces less than the 2024 model.

The Premium Pen is the same stylus included with the Colorsoft. It’s a simple, cylindrical white stick with one end tapering into a pencil-like tip for writing and drawing. The other end features a rounded, rubber button for erasing. A single button sits flush on the side of the stylus, near the writing tip. The stylus doesn’t need to be charged, and always stays ready when sitting on the edge of the Scribe.

The white-border, gray-body look of the Scribe with a white Premium Pen is the only version currently available, called Graphite. Unlike the Colorsoft, it doesn’t have a more festive Fig color scheme that turns the bezel, body, and even the stylus burgundy.

Hardware: Bigger Screen, Same Battery

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

The 11-inch E Ink screen is larger than its predecessor’s 10.2-inch display, with the same 300 pixels per inch (ppi) resolution and adjustable front light. It’s the same size and resolution as the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft’s screen, though it doesn’t have color, and the Colorsoft’s pixel density drops to 150ppi when displaying color. The black-and-white Scribe’s screen looks better when showing monochrome content, especially with the front light off, because its neutral state is a lighter gray. The Colorsoft's monochrome background is significantly darker, and when testing it, I found I had to crank its light up for the text to be as readable as the new Scribe is with only ambient light.

You get 32GB of storage on the standard $499.99 Scribe, or you can pay $50 more for a version with 64GB. With no support for memory cards, there’s no way to expand either one. The cheaper, front-light-less model has only 16GB of storage, which may not be enough depending on your content needs.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

According to Amazon, the Kindle Scribe's battery can last up to 12 weeks of reading or three weeks of actively writing before you have to plug it in. This is better than the Scribe Colorsoft’s stated eight weeks of reading or two weeks of writing, but the same as the 2024 Scribe's battery life. Either way, you can expect at least a month of reading and a week or two of taking notes between charges.

Reading: Works Best With Amazon Content

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.

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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. 

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.

Writing: Fine for Taking Notes, Less So for Drawing

The Workspace tab is where you find all of your notebooks on the Kindle Scribe, and where you use the Premium Pen to jot down notes and make sketches in full paginated workbooks or one-page quick notes files.

If you import work documents, they are added to the Library and not the Workspace tab by default. You have to manually select the file in the Library, then tap Add to Workspace to add it to your workspace alongside your notebooks. It’s a minor inconvenience, and understandable for PDFs, which could easily be ebooks or work files, but automatically syncing DOC and DOCX files in the Workspace tab would have been helpful.

There are 25 notebook templates, from blank pages to various ruled pages with and without margins, to checklists and day planners. They have fixed backgrounds to provide structure to your notes and stay in place even if you erase what you write or draw. As for how you write or draw, the Kindle Scribe has four pen types (fountain pen, marker, pen, and pencil), a gray highlighter, and an eraser, each with five widths. If you want to erase quickly, you can flip the Premium Pen to its rounded end to automatically use the medium-width eraser. You use the highlighter by clicking and holding the button on the Pen and drawing with the stylus, or you can change the button to activate another pen, the eraser, or the lasso to select a part of your notebook for copying and pasting.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Writing with the Premium Pen feels terrific. The stylus tip has just the right amount of friction against the screen to feel at least a little like paper, rather than sliding a piece of plastic across glass. The screen also responds instantly to pen strokes, so it visually seems like you are putting pencil to paper. The eraser is a different story, because it tries to smooth out anything you draw instead of just erasing with the same precision as writing. Dragging the eraser across thickly shaded drawings (or, in my case, blobs) results in scalloped edges instead of straight lines. I’m really not sure why it does that, and it will probably put a damper on artists who sketch using negative space.

AI Features: It Can Read My (Bad) Handwriting

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If you’re mostly writing notes, the Kindle Scribe has two AI features you can activate to scan and process what you write. The Summarize feature analyzes your notes and attempts to condense them for easier reading. It boils the page down to a shorter list of bulleted statements, like a typical AI summary. I sketched out and wrote a few lines from our review of the 2024 Kindle Scribe and then had the 2025 Scribe summarize it. It gave a short, incomplete summary of the pros, cons, and bottom line from the review, omitting the clearly marked price. To the AI’s credit, though, it at least seemed to understand my terrible handwriting.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Refine Writing sounds like it should take what you've written and refine it, but in my tests, it seems to be more of a straight transcription feature. I used the Refine Writing function on the same badly copied review page, and it carried over everything word-for-word. It clearly showed the retail price, and the pros and cons were properly labeled with checks and minuses, though my poorly drawn bubbles were turned into empty circles. The text recognition functionality is impressive, though I’m leery of it being accessible only through the Refine Writing tool that could, theoretically, remove important pieces of personality and context in the interests of sterile readability.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

You can write and draw in books and imported documents, too. Neither AI feature is available when working on these documents, but the basic pen functions are all intact, as are the sticky note and active canvas features that aren’t in the Scribe’s notebooks. Sticky notes let you put a small, tappable icon in the margins of your document that can pop up handwritten or text notes, like comments in Google Docs or Microsoft Word. Active canvas inserts your notes directly into the document's text, rearranging the text around them. They’re handy annotation features, whether you want them to be hidden and accessible through a tap, or dropped in the middle of the document where they can’t be missed.