One of the biggest downsides of a black and white e-readers is that highlighting and annotating them is hardly as easy as it would be on a full-featured tablet, let alone a physical book. Amazon aimed to directly address those problems with the Kindle Scribe, an e-reader with a writable screen and a stylus.
Now through August 4 at Best Buy, you can get the 16GB Kindle Scribe for $269.99 (down from $339.99). This is the lowest price for the Kindle Scribe I have seen, beating Prime Day and Black Friday prices, according to price-checking tools. If you’ve been considering getting one (or any of the other Kindles currently on sale during Best Buy’s 48-hour Flash Sale), now may be the time.
A great upgrade for Kindle users
Compared to a vanilla Kindle, the Kindle Scribe is expensive. It runs a bit over twice the price of the most basic model, but the upgrade is worth it for the right user. If you think the Kindle or Paperwhite screens are too small and you find yourself reading in landscape mode to make the font larger and more legible, then you might love the Scribe’s big screen. And if you need a digital notebook, it’s great for that too. It offers weeks of battery life, Bluetooth capabilities, and auto-adjusting lighting.
There are downsides: Unlike the Kindle Paperwhite, the Scribe is not waterproof. It also doesn’t have the page turn buttons the discontinued Kindle Oasis had, which some prefer to a touchscreen.
What you can and can’t do with the Scribe
The Kindle Scribe syncs with cloud storage, allowing you to transfer your notes to other devices. When using PDF files, you can write directly on the page as long as they are imported through the “Send to Kindle” option. You can write on your books, but not comics or illustrated children’s books. You can make handwritten sticky notes, text notes, and highlights to the following file types: DOC, DOCX, TXT, RTF, HTM, HTML, PNG, GIF, JPG, JPEG, BMP, EPUB. (You can see the full list of features here.)
The Kindle Scribe is much cheaper than similar e-readers, like the reMarkable 2.