[tomsem]

If it's ever demonstrated that Amazon is snooping on your personal documents, don't you think they'd never hear the end of the class action lawsuits? It would be very damaging to them. (Does DropBox spy on your content? OneDrive, Google Drive? it is the same misguided concern)

They wouldn't even get much benefit from doing so, not when they already know all they need to know about you by what you click on, your purchase history, what you ask Alexa about, etc.

And there are also reasons why they would NOT want to know or even be able to know what you are uploading, other than the technical details of storing and retrieving a blob of data. If any Amazon employee could access this, and put it to malicious use, they'd be culpable. Or subject to subpoena in the event the customer is involved in some criminal activity, or some such. None of that makes them money. So it's in their interest to cordon it off, as they need to with other sensitive customer data, to prevent abuse and unnecessary distractions.

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What does it matter if what you are marking up on the Scribe is an actual PDF file? If it walks like a duck, etc. The issue now is that it walks like a lame duck, it's lossy. They can improve that.

Similarly they can improve the export so you wind up with an actual PDF indistinguishable from what you submitted. It's no different conceptually than reading a PDF into memory, changing some things, and then replacing the original file on disk.

And having all of this conversion in the cloud means they don't constantly need to update device firmware to fix things. And those services can also be leveraged, e.g. they can implement Notebook in the Kindle apps.

I think we can be confident there will be improvements because they've said there will be, and the time to do it is in the next few months, when the 'iron is hot'. What we're seeing now is the 'minimum viable product', not what it'll be 3 months or a year from now.