Amazon announces the Kindle Scribe - 10.2" Kindle with stylus support

[Quoth]

So stylus sounds poor and it might be Fire OS with eink (= Amazon version of Android or Crippled Android. They have Fire TV screens which is as bad as Android TV).

I'd certainly not want to be an early adopter even if I was an Amazon fan. Don't believe any tech blog or newspaper review.

[tomsem]

I doubt it is running Fire OS. More likely that 'report' is embellishment. They need to preserve Kindle look and feel for better and worse. Everyone expects this. The UI of the reading app is the same as the other Kindles.

That said it would be good if it had an SDK for third party plugins or apps, as there was for a few generations of Kindles. Integrations with Evernote, OneNote, Pocket, etc.

[WillAdams]

The stylus is Wacom EMR, w/ very low latency, just no pressure input --- I've used systems w/ no pressure input in the past (NCR-3125 w/ early-generation Wacom EMR (the same as "Penabled" for Tablet PCs) and Fujitsu Stylistic 2300 w/ Finepoint) -- it's perfectly workable for annotation, on/off drawing, and non-modulated handwriting. It's not something which one would choose to creatively draw or paint on (I'd always defer drawing until I was at home to use my Wacom ArtZ on my NeXT Cube), but it's not being marketed for creative work beyond note-taking/journaling.

The information posted came from an industry insider whose information has thus far been quite reliable.

Which seems more likely?

- Amazon worked up a complete graphical toolkit to support annotation and interactivity w/ a pointing device
- Amazon stripped a bunch of stuff out of an OS which they were already using which already has support for annotation and interactivity w/ a pointing device and ported their reading application from a simpler OS and added interactive annotation to it

[jhowell]

As I mentioned previously Amazon already has experience with using Android in Kindles used in the Chinese market. In those devices there is no launcher or other Android user interface. It boots right into the Kindle app with no way to exit. From the user’s perspective it works like a regular Kindle.

There is likely a cost in CPU and battery utilization compared with the original Kindle OS. The Scribe can compensate by having a faster processor and larger battery.

I would not be surprised if all new Kindle models work this way going forward.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by rcentros

Only if you don't want them.

They aren't needed as the touch screen does it all.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by WillAdams

The stylus is Wacom EMR, w/ very low latency, just no pressure input --- I've used systems w/ no pressure input in the past
…
The information posted came from an industry insider whose information has thus far been quite reliable.

Which seems more likely?

- Amazon worked up a complete graphical toolkit to support annotation and interactivity w/ a pointing device
- Amazon stripped a bunch of stuff out of an OS which they were already using which already has support for annotation and interactivity w/ a pointing device and ported their reading application from a simpler OS and added interactive annotation to it

AFAIK MS had annotation on a version of WFWG 3.11 (For a Grid Tablet) and it's been on NT (Win10 is about ver 7 of NT in reality) and Linux for years. I've still an install disk for NT 4.0 Tablet Edition.

But Handwriting recognition/Conversion has always been an app/program except (maybe on the Newton and) Palm OS, though Palm OS graffiti was letter by letter stylized gestures (I still have a working Palm Z22). I used the Newton once and it didn't really work (Both the Palm and Nebo are hugely better).

I've had stylus on WFWG 3.11, NT and Linux from 1990s. Nebo on Kobo (built in on Sage & Elipsa) and iPad (maybe iPad 2018 and later and even free Nebo does recognition) is the first handwriting recognition I've used that can actually be used to create text notes or stories for PC text input. Presumably it works on suitable Windows and Android with real digitiser styluses. I've not seen any latency issue on the 2020 iPad (I think that's year bought), Sage or Elipsa.

Never seen any with Lenovo X201 laptop Wacom or USB Wacom Bamboo.


Having no pressure sensitivity might have been reasonable if the very first Kindle (2007?) had had annotations and simple drawing app. It's a strange decision in 2022 if true when Samsung Note, iPad, MS Surface, Kobo and others all have about a 1000 levels of sensitivity. It allows for better handwriting recognition and detection of forged signatures.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by WillAdams

E-ink display arguably makes it a Kindle, and that's the nomenclature the manufacturer has chosen.

Curious which apps will potentially work well on it once 3rd party apps are opened up.

It's a Fire tablet with an eInk screen.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Quoth

So stylus sounds poor and it might be Fire OS with eink (= Amazon version of Android or Crippled Android. They have Fire TV screens which is as bad as Android TV).

I'd certainly not want to be an early adopter even if I was an Amazon fan. Don't believe any tech blog or newspaper review.

I did see one of the 65" TCL TVs that Amazon is selling (Fire TV) and it's not good.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

It's a Fire tablet with an eInk screen.

I don't think so.

[WillAdams]

I would characterize it as a Kindle tablet which runs the Fire OS to launch only the Kindle app.

I've always done fine w/ handwriting recognition, and have used pretty much everything from Go Corp.'s PenPoint through Newton, and Windows Tablet PC, and Apple's Calligrapher on Mac OS X, as well as the various stand-alone apps.

Agree, Nebo.app is excellent.

As noted above, the lack of pressure-sensitivity is a consequence of the layers of the touch screen, digitizer, and e-ink --- we'll have to see how it plays out in terms of function and in the marketplace --- I'll be very pleased if the stylus works w/ my other current-generation Wacom EMR devices (which have 4,096 levels of pressure input) whether it has pressure-input on them or no. Possibilities would seem to be:

- Kindle Scribe digitizer lacks pressure input, accepts any current-generation Wacom EMR stylus, but w/o pressure
- Kindle Scribe digitizer and stylus lack pressure input, Kindle Scribe stylus when used on other Wacom EMR devices tracks, but when touched to the screen doesn't provide pressure information
- Kindle Scribe digitizer and stylus are a different sort of hardware and there is no compatibility

We'll see which it is, and whether or no that changes w/ future iterations (if any).

[jhowell]

I took a look at the recently released Kindle for Android version 8.66.1.0 and found this message apparently related to the Kindle Scribe:

Allows you to change font style and size, but on-page writing isn't supported and some formatting may be lost.

I don't know the circumstances that would lead to this message being presented to a user. It seems to imply an ability to switch between a fixed-layout and a reflowable view for some type of document, possibly PDF.

[WillAdams]

Yeah, one can apparently directly write on PDFs --- curious as to how such annotations are stored, and how one gets them off the Scribe and onto a desktop.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by WillAdams

Yeah, one can apparently directly write on PDFs --- curious as to how such annotations are stored, and how one gets them off the Scribe and onto a desktop.

On every device I've used it adds a layer to PDF (so protected ones don't work). Just an image. So "export" is copy the entire PDF to PC or another device. No actual text.
So only real ebooks (mobi, azw3/KF8, epub) have actual text annotations that can be imported to a text editor or copy/pasted to edit the Wordprocessor source the ebook was made from.

PDFs are essentially not real ebooks, but for print, or onscreen preview/view of a particular paper size.

Unless you have handwriting recognition or text entry you can't have a text file. Also unlike an ebook a separate text file of the annotation for a PDF might not easily have source text and location. So annotation like a ballpoint pen on paper (no actual computer text) is actually reasonable for PDFs. PDFs are ghastly to seriously proof and annotate. We only proof & annotate epubs and only check PDFs for format errors, never ever content.

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

They aren't needed as the touch screen does it all.

Several of my touch screens are lazy. They say they can't do it all and want buttons to help out. I'm indulgent so I let them have the buttons. One of my newer eInk screens doesn't even have touch at all, can you imagine?

[WillAdams]

There are multiple ways to do annotation on a PDF, not all of which involve images.

It will be interesting to see which technique(s) the Kindle Scribe uses.

I don't see the argument that PDFs aren't "real" books --- they allow pagination, and typesetting and line breaks which can be optimized and controlled in a way which other ebook formats can't, but that's a different discussion and off-topic for this thread.