Scribe's Annoying, Clumsy, and Completely Unnecessary Note Toolbar

[talaivan]

Originally Posted by tomsem

And my current belief is that Amazon wants Scribe to do more than mark up converted PDF files: they want to give Scribe access to content available in Print Replica format in the Kindle Store (textbooks etc), which should find a market for Scribe with students at all levels, especially with the Notebook features built in.

Well, this all sounds good, but what am I to do if I want to mark up a pdf on the Scribe and then be able to see it on a computer/ipad/other ereader? I totally agree that pdf's are not entirely satisfactory, to put it mildly -- for example, one cannot search many languages (Tamil, Hindi, etc.) on a pdf. But still many people organize their work around collections of many many pdf's, which they would like to mark up. I did try sending a pdf to my Kindle account, and I could mark it up without problem on the Scribe and liked the way the stylus worked. But when I opened the Kindle app on my mac, the file was without any of my mark-ups. Like them or not, pdf's, like the QWERTY keyboard, have now become universally necessary.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by talaivan

Well, this all sounds good, but what am I to do if I want to mark up a pdf on the Scribe and then be able to see it on a computer/ipad/other ereader? I totally agree that pdf's are not entirely satisfactory, to put it mildly -- for example, one cannot search many languages (Tamil, Hindi, etc.) on a pdf. But still many people organize their work around collections of many many pdf's, which they would like to mark up. I did try sending a pdf to my Kindle account, and I could mark it up without problem on the Scribe and liked the way the stylus worked. But when I opened the Kindle app on my mac, the file was without any of my mark-ups. Like them or not, pdf's, like the QWERTY keyboard, have now become universally necessary.

Right now, they're only working on the workflow for the Scribe. The other Kindles and Kindle apps are the same as before.

What you are able to do now is send a PDF, it gets converted to Print Replica and you can do some markup and then have it send a PDF attachment to your email address. The PDF seems to be a placeholder, and it contains a series of images showing your markups. It is just enough to demonstrate what the end to end workflow looks like.

It appears Scribe will need a firmware update to fix the issue with not being able to interact with text. But the outbound conversion can probably improve without one. I think that any annotation you make will not require re-sending anything, it'll just start working after the firmware update.

It's not clear if the other Kindles will ever see any change from the existing PDF functionality. They can get a copy of the PDF that's sent in, but PDF's don't sync annotations and reading position.

They're probably already well along to replicating this workflow on the Android and iOS apps, and until then, they'll get something that looks like the PDF that got sent in. It's not even clear they are PDFs, since all you can do is create bookmarks (that don't sync) and zoom in. It's quite possible they could have ben Print Replica all along, placeholders for functionality yet to come. I'd actually be surprised if they were not, given what we've learned from Scribe.

Fire probably does have a PDF render capability in the Kindle app as I think your'e able to side load them.

When I get a chance I'll side load a PDF to the Kindle app for iOS to see what happens there. And try to load KFX from Scribe as well.

[talaivan]

Well, if they manage to make the workflow transparent, so one can mark up a pdf on the Scribe and then download it again as a pdf, that would make the Scribe much more useful. It does do a very good job when one writes on the screen with the pencil -- obviously better than an iPad in terms of smoothness etc. I guess in one respect the Scribe is a bit like the iPad: the hardware is much better than the firmware. I also have an Elipsa, but writing with the Kobo pen (which needs a battery) is not as smooth or easy as on the Scribe. Also, of course, the Elipsa has a lower resolution and only a blue background light, and so its screen is not as good as the Scribe's. One final thing: it would be very useful if Amazon would allow one to download the marked-up pdf to a cloud account of some sort that is also accessible from a computer (e.g. Dropbox).

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by talaivan

Well, if they manage to make the workflow transparent, so one can mark up a pdf on the Scribe and then download it again as a pdf, that would make the Scribe much more useful. It does do a very good job when one writes on the screen with the pencil -- obviously better than an iPad in terms of smoothness etc. I guess in one respect the Scribe is a bit like the iPad: the hardware is much better than the firmware. I also have an Elipsa, but writing with the Kobo pen (which needs a battery) is not as smooth or easy as on the Scribe. Also, of course, the Elipsa has a lower resolution and only a blue background light, and so its screen is not as good as the Scribe's. One final thing: it would be very useful if Amazon would allow one to download the marked-up pdf to a cloud account of some sort that is also accessible from a computer (e.g. Dropbox).

Actually it sends email with a link to download, not as attachment. The link expires after 7 days. You can share with anybody, there's no login. But the URL looks like it has encryption key in it so the endpoint will reject things that don't have it. Secure in that sense.

And I do think the PDF will eventually be the one you sent, plus whatever annotations you've made to it at the time you request Share. It wouldn't be very useful otherwise.

But as I think of it, there's another case: you send a PDF that already has annotations. Probably not going to see them on Scribe, at least not with some additional attention in the import service. PDF has a lot of different markup options and there are only a couple of them on Scribe. Would be interesting to test, just to confirm there's nothing there at the moment to handle it. And I would be surprised if Amazon's planning to handle this case, it seems gnarly.

But already I haven't done the other things I've been wanting to try ...

[tomsem]

Well, I don't know what I was expecting but the KFX file I pulled off Scribe and put on my iPad mini functions as one would hope Scribe will soon:

- can select text, highlight, and add notes (on iPad of course, handwriting recognition
kicks in)
- hyperlinks work
- text remains crisp to zoom in limit

So it confirms (again) that the files are intact and it's an issue with Scribe firmware, and for iOS, they can flip a switch, and service will send Print Replica (instead of PDF) that you can mark up with Kindle app (at least with text notes, highlights, etc.)

The PDF I put on behaves like PDFs downloaded from personal documents storage, which is to say they are just rendered and you can't mark them up. I suspect they're just using whatever is built in to iOS for PDF preview. Not likely to change.

The app seems not to know KFX files were side-loaded (noticed this before). So it brings up Delete From Library option.