Kindle Scribe Notes

[apastuszak]

I bought the Kindle Scribe for the larger screen. I really didn't care about note taking on it. But since I own the thing, I figured I would give it a try.

I wrote a few lines of notes and wanted to convert them to text, and the only way to do that is to email it to myself?? Is that right?

Why can't it do it on the Kindle?

Back in the 1990s I had an Apple Newton, and you would write on the screen and when you stopped writing, it would convert whatever you wrote to text and remove your handwriting off the page.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by apastuszak

I bought the Kindle Scribe for the larger screen. I really didn't care about note taking on it. But since I own the thing, I figured I would give it a try.

I wrote a few lines of notes and wanted to convert them to text, and the only way to do that is to email it to myself?? Is that right?

Why can't it do it on the Kindle?

Back in the 1990s I had an Apple Newton, and you would write on the screen and when you stopped writing, it would convert whatever you wrote to text and remove your handwriting off the page.

I had a Newton briefly, it was terrible at HWR, or at least you needed to learn its HW style. More seriously it could not even play chess. I sold it first chance I got.

Scribe has no on-board handwriting conversion service.

However when exporting with text, one of the options converts the text with the cloud service, sends it to the Scribe, and lets you review and make corrections on device before sending it (or cancelling).

Personally, I want it to stay handwritten so I prefer this approach. There is no 100% accurate HWR and I don't want to have to correct it constantly. I just want use it like pen and paper.

I have an iPad if I want to do text entry with handwriting, but I don't do much of it. It's pretty accurate, but it still makes mistakes, which interrupts my creative flow because I feel compelled to stop and correct it.

But I would like Notebooks indexed so I can search for some text in notebooks.

It could be another client of the existing conversion service, but would take the output, index it, and send the index to Scribe as part of sync. They could also index sticky notes and annotations to personal documents converted from PDF.

While this seems quite doable, I don't think Amazon will do that either. I think they regard Scribe as feature complete for the market segment they are targeting.

And if you were to survey Scribe owners they would probably rank dozens of other features ahead of this.

[apastuszak]

Newton's HWR got really good towards the end of its life. The 2.1 NewtonOS update for the MessagePad 2100 vastly improved HWR on it.

I bought the Scribe for the large screen. I didn't care about the note-taking. And with how limited the feature is, it looks like I won't be using it.

Searching Notesbooks is really something that needs to happen.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by tomsem

Personally, I want it to stay handwritten so I prefer this approach. There is no 100% accurate HWR and I don't want to have to correct it constantly. I just want use it like pen and paper.

That's why the full version of Nebo does real time preview and the Handwriting option of Gboard on Android is also realtime with alternate previews. In comparison the offline conversion of captured images / vectors is very poor, even compared to not backtracking/alternate selection.

Eink screen is too slow for real-time preview, so Nebo on Kobo doesn't offer it, but editing is quick and it's still better than off-line conversion (which I've used).
Newton and Palm Graffitti were not good enough*. The use of Gboard on eink is poor as is Nebo compared to a decent tablet with digitiser. So I've now abandoned Sage/Elipsa for notes. Even the Libra 2 can capture pen handwriting as an SVG which can be processed as well as original reMarkaable (though they may have now added local Nebo based conversion).

IMO any product should not claim handwriting unless it has local conversion that works without Internet, for issues of honesty, performance/accuracy and privacy. It's just sketching.

The real time versions have improved far more than essentially OCR on a captured file. Real time Preview Nebo is a little less accurate than Gboard (which works off line) but is a little faster to write a large volume. Even with a fingertip the Gboard is faster and more accurate than my typing. I only use the text touch keyboard for less common punctuation marks or € on Gboard (space bar flips qwerty/handwriting and is left-right cursor).

[* Apple Newton: August 1993 to March 1998. Palm OS Graffiti is a similar start era but up to 2010. Xerox was able to persuade US courts they invented it first. No-one should have had a patent on such a thing. It's easier than learning Cunieform]

[tomsem]

It is much, much easier to build, test, scale, and improve cloud services than to test an application that does the same thing running on a mobile or embedded system device like Kindle. There are not as many resource constraints, and you can have people work on it without them knowing anything about Scribe internals and development environment.

Amazon is not OCRing static images. Scribe samples at a very high rate (I think 100-200 per second) and notebooks are essentially recording a time series of events, these get 'played back' every time you open a notebook.

[apastuszak]

Originally Posted by tomsem

It is much, much easier to build, test, scale, and improve cloud services than to test an application that does the same thing running on a mobile or embedded system device like Kindle. There are not as many resource constraints, and you can have people work on it without them knowing anything about Scribe internals and development environment.

Amazon is not OCRing static images. Scribe samples at a very high rate (I think 100-200 per second) and notebooks are essentially recording a time series of events, these get 'played back' every time you open a notebook.

Well, then make Kindle Create a front end to the cloud service rather than process stuff local.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by apastuszak

Well, then make Kindle Create a front end to the cloud service rather than process stuff local.

I didn't realize links did not work with kpf -> kfx.

But that is I think because the plugin is using Kindle Previewer and that probably does not know everything about Print Replica, so some things are not getting translated. The same kpf, uploaded to KDP, would use a the pipeline intended for it.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by tomsem

It is much, much easier to build, test, scale, and improve cloud services than to test an application that does the same thing running on a mobile or embedded system device like Kindle. T

Nonsense. If anything there are more issues with a cloud service. It's just a server and needs extra software compared with a standalone device.

Also debugging Internet facing services is a horror with multiple "languages" script types in one text file that's not compiled.

I've worked on both for the day job.

Also so called cloud services have multiple users and a remote client vs one user and local GUI. They are a horror to develop and debug.

[apastuszak]

Originally Posted by tomsem

I didn't realize links did not work with kpf -> kfx.

But that is I think because the plugin is using Kindle Previewer and that probably does not know everything about Print Replica, so some things are not getting translated. The same kpf, uploaded to KDP, would use a the pipeline intended for it.

It's not just links. Most of the pages come across as images, so they're not searchable and you can't hilight lines and leave notes. Some links come across, some don't.

And this is the official tool authors are supposed to use to make "Print Replica" ebooks. The only input it accept are PDFs for "Print Replica."

Amazon really needs to fix this.

[Gone]

I tested the Scribe and I was impressed by how well it could translate my awful handwriting. I'd say it was at least 90% accurate.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Nonsense. If anything there are more issues with a cloud service. It's just a server and needs extra software compared with a standalone device.

Also debugging Internet facing services is a horror with multiple "languages" script types in one text file that's not compiled.

I've worked on both for the day job.

Also so called cloud services have multiple users and a remote client vs one user and local GUI. They are a horror to develop and debug.

I too have relevant work experience, and I will stand by my opinion. If you are ever in California, please look me up and we can trade stories.

But none of that is relevant because there are facts about Scribe that weigh in here, namely that Notebook format does not store text. It is just a series of 1 or more pages, each with zero or more strokes, which contain 1 or more points, with attributes (x, y, timestamp, thickness, and optionally pressure and tilt). Even what looks like text in Templates is just strokes.

They could do on device handwriting OCR (the Fire 11 Max does), but what would they do with the text without changing the format and immediately introducing all sorts of complexity that they decided early was not necessary for modeling a pencil and paper experience. (well, they could generate an index, that would be nice).

[Quoth]

Try both Gboard handwriting on Android 8 and later (check ALL settings first, and digitizer not needed) and Nebo on Android (€10 approx) on an Android with digitiser and a pen (or maybe the full iOS version with Apple Pencil to see PDF support), never mind Kobo Sage or Elipsa. The reMarkable used to do handwriting like the Scribe with their server to convert. I think a recent FW update may have added Nebo. Then tell me Amazon isn't suffering from a mix of "Not invented here" and "All your stuff belong us!" Compare full Nebo with OneNote!

On device handwriting conversion can use a smarter approach than OCR does and offers instant preview (with ability to select an alternate, but not on eink). Even without correction it's good enough for a draft of a story or taking live notes at a meeting.

If you are ever transiting Shannon or visiting Ireland I can show you the source code of server (cloud) applications (I think I have a copy somewhere), Windows, DOS, embedded Linux, micro controllers in high level languages etc. Even having the Server stuff running local on a VM it was a horror to develop and debug compared to a Document Management system in VB6+ Modula2, a platfom game in Modula-2 with multitasking multimedia on DOS, a JAL based PIC 18F with LCD and RDS decoding, a 4G phone/PDA running Debian.

[Quoth]

Only a back-end server application that could run on any linux anyway is compiled. All the rest of it is a horrible mess of text files with server-side (maybe 3 lanaguages) and client-side executables as text, CSS, HTML, SQL queries etc. It's a political, not technical decision, the way notes, KFX and PDF works on a Scribe.

[tomsem]

Ah, Modula-2. I used that for my first paid programming job (Time Line project management, running on MS-DOS). Sadly, we had to abandon that for CPP in porting to Windows. Symantec even purchased a company that made a CPP development tool, and embarked on developing a cross-platform (Mac and Windows) SDK known as Bedrock. By the time the dust settled Microsoft Project (included with Office for site licenses, i.e. essentially free) wiped out our market share and Symantec closed the doors on the Project Management Group, the development tools group after that, is now Gen Digital (Norton LifeLock) with the enterprise product group now part of BroadCom.

As for Amazon's decision to do HWR in cloud rather than on device, I do not see that as political, but just reflecting the fact that they are leveraging AWS which is a core competency of theirs. Web services are very cookie cutter these days, and many people have the skills to work on them.

In this specific case the web service is not serving HTML/CSS or doing SQL queries to perform the task of converting notebook handwriting to text. Those things are not its job.

By contrast, they probably have very few people who know how to do development on Kindle.

It took better part of a year just to get Notebooks to be the minimally viable feature it should have been when it shipped.

I think most people with Scribes are just using them as big Kindles, and the basic Notebook features are fine as pen and paper replacement. There is no reason for Amazon to develop more advanced Notebook features.

So I think we will not be seeing any new Notebook features in the future (or many Kindle features more generally). Amazon appears content with the current state of Kindle platform, and it's more or less in keep the lights on mode. It seems the Alexa thing has cooled off too.

ReMarkable does on device conversion, but it is now almost 4 years since RM 2 shipped (Aug 2020). Evidently there is no market for similar devices that Amazon has any interest in capturing.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by tomsem

Ah, Modula-2. I used that for my first paid programming job (Time Line project management, running on MS-DOS). Sadly, we had to abandon that for CPP in porting to Windows.

Yes, I had to do contract work in C, C++ and Java, among other things.

Originally Posted by tomsem

ReMarkable does on device conversion, but it is now almost 4 years since RM 2 shipped (Aug 2020). Evidently there is no market for similar devices that Amazon has any interest in capturing.

Now, by buying in MyWrite Nebo. For years they only used a so called cloud service. One trick pony. The RM2 is basically a cost reduced RM1 with the buttons removed. It's a bad copy of an early Sony DPT.

I nearly bought a Scribe due to 300 dpi and notes, though I already had the Kobo Elipsa and Kobo Sage. I also considered the sort of premium Fire tablet with notes.
Now I only read epubs and touch keyboard abbriviated notes to highlights on it. I think eink is too slow for notetaking with realtime conversion and preview. I still buy ebooks from Amazon and bought many eink Kindles from them (for me an other family members) since 2011 or 2012. I doubt I'll ever buy a Kindle or Fire tablet now.