Kindle Scribe

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Zimmy

Got mine today.
Kind of miffed that they offer you 3 month trial to Kindle Unlimited but if you ordered it with the free trial, it was 4 months.
The device looks and feels amazing so far.
----
update, I got an email that let me chose the 4 month offer again.

I used trade-in discount.

I tried to add KU option (try to extend my current subscription), but it removed the 20% off trade in discount. Had to empty shopping cart and start over.

[HLS]

its on sale now at best by $65 off 64GB and $45 off 16GB

[CheyenneDonna]

Where did you find the matching sleeve?

[solitarywolf]

Originally Posted by HLS

its on sale now at best by $65 off 64GB and $45 off 16GB

Too bad I didn’t wait. Good sale prices.

[Zimmy]

Originally Posted by tomsem

I used trade-in discount.

I tried to add KU option (try to extend my current subscription), but it removed the 20% off trade in discount. Had to empty shopping cart and start over.

It is odd.
When I go to the normal Kindle Unlimited page, I get the standard 30 days or 1 month for $5 (I think).
Setting up my Kindle, I was offered 3.
But if you check your email after registering the device, you get the 4 months, which I took.

[talaivan]

The Scribe is a beautifully engineered ereader -- except, as many have pointed out, for the software. I was amazed that it is impossible to transfer a pdf file to it and edit the file, as one can on other devices (Kobo elipsa/sage, BOOX, iPad). Why would I want to run a pdf file through "Send to Kindle," have it converted to an Amazon format by Amazon, and edit it on the Scribe without being able to get the file I have edited back in pdf format? This drastically reduces the value of the Scribe for me, though I find it a wonderful ereader for just reading. Another thing -- I normally do not want to share a pdf I am editing with anyone. By uploading it to Amazon, how sure can I be that my file cannot be read by anyone else? Note that Kobo's solution to this problem is quite elegant. You can edit a file in Dropbox on the Sage/Elipsa, and your changes will be saved back to Dropbox, and they will appear on Mac and iPadOS apps like PDF Expert. Unfortunately, I suspect the chances that Amazon will remedy this deficiency are close to zero.

[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.

---

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.

[Quoth]

Google was found to be snooping, multiple times. Just slaps on the wrist.


The fact is there is no technical or engineering justification for how the Kindle Scribes manages PDFs. It's either total stupidity (I don't rule it out) or deliberate as part of Amazon's scanning.

Kindle Unlimited is designed such that it only works at all by the use of very invasive monitoring of pages read.

This is nothing to do about quality of annotation or fixing firmware.

It's a hugely inferior system to mark up PDFs, needs internet, opaque security & privacy and a massive step backwards to what everyone else does. There is zero justification other than either stupidity or greed to find out what people are doing. This makes it the worst system for proof or annotate of PDFs.

It won't be better in 3 months time unless they completely U-turn and scrap this nonsense way of doing it, which is more complicated than simply marking up the PDF and zero Amazon server / cloud use.

[jackie_w]

I'm neither a Kindle user nor a note-taker but I find the user reactions to this Scribe very interesting.

Is it now acceptable to users that a company can take your money today for a device priced as a big screen annotating device whose annotating software isn't currently up to much but should be "better soon" without giving specific details of what "better" and "soon" actually mean?

Is there any company other than Amazon who could get away with this?

[tomsem]

In your opinion, it is inferior. But your concerns and opinions are not shared by everyone. They're perfectly reasonable, but not the only reasonable ones out there.

They aren't scrapping their approach, they believe in it. From engineering perspective it makes sense, at least to me. 'What everyone else does' is not the only way of doing things. Amazon's advantage is that they have cloud resources to throw at every sort of technical problem, it's part of their business and they leverage it. And it allows them to make improvements and fixes more independently of device updates.

The others are trying to do everything as if it's still 2000. Cloud based services aren't part of their business, they're unwelcome expenses.

Put another way, others are building devices, Amazon is focussing on platforms, and they're successful at it. AWS is the most profitable business segment for them.

Monitoring of KU pages read (for example) is not of necessity retaining personally identifiable information. As I argued above, it's unnecessary to do so, and unwise to do so.

One can argue about the metrics they use to determine payout to KU authors, but they will all involve some way of tracking the actual borrows.

And of course Google oversteps. Nearly all of their money comes from selling customer profiles to advertisers. Amazon does its share of this as well but it's not the core business.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

I'm neither a Kindle user nor a note-taker but I find the user reactions to this Scribe very interesting.

Is it now acceptable to users that a company can take your money today for a device priced as a big screen annotating device whose annotating software isn't currently up to much but should be "better soon" without giving specific details of what "better" and "soon" actually mean?

Is there any company other than Amazon who could get away with this?

They haven't promised very much ('better Word integration'), and they only said that because they had pre-announced that specific feature. They have acknowledged that it is not everything they are shooting for. All before the launch. They aren't claiming it's better than the competition at this point. It's not a bait and switch.

And while Notebook features are lacking, what is there is stable and functional. The reading features are what every Kindle user is expecting. Was there even a post launch update? (I see Scribe is on 5.16.1, other Kindles are 5.15.1)

And as newcomers to the notebook market, what they're shooting for is not fixed in stone: critically, they need feedback from actual users to focus the deliverables in future updates.

Clearly holiday season was a fixed target. Some features weren't ready. That's perfectly ordinary. Software development is not as predictable as modifying an existing hardware design (Kindle). Some things that look easy take ten times longer, and the hard things usually remain hard. To meet a given ship date, you have to be prepared to have a minimally viable product ready to go and leave the rest for a future update. Almost all software development now is iterative and designed to facilitate this ability to meet deadlines with a viable release and not wait for everything originally on the feature backlog to be ready.

Apple for example announced and demonstrated new iPadOS features months before the expected release in the Fall. But not only did they not ship iPadOS 16.0, the first release was 16.1, a few weeks later. And only 16.2 finally delivered the rest of the features announced. I'm sure they would have liked it to be ready for 16.0 but had to adjust to the realities of software development.

Amazon is not going to share their strategic vision or feature roadmap for competitive reasons, and also out of respect for customers thinking of buying it, much less tell us when things will show up. The fact is, they don't know for sure.

Bezos was fond of saying 'stay tuned'.

[BionicGecko]

Originally Posted by tomsem

And while Notebook features are lacking, what is there is stable and functional.

That opinion doesn't seem shared by Voja of MyDeepGuide (see previous post here). From what I remember, conversion from source PDFs is both incorrect (e.g. hyperlink locations are not scaled with the rest of the document) and erratic (different "runs" yield different results). Also the note taking functionality is very bare-bone, for instance there is no way to easily go between pages in a notebook, one has to manually go back or forward page-by-page. Not making it possible for users to write directly on books except via sticky notes is also a mind-boggling decision.

I guess everybody is entitled to their own definition of functional, but the note taking functionality of the Scribe as it is today doesn't meet mine.

[Zimmy]

Might be a dumb question but is there a way to make a PDF document show up in the Notebook section?
I downloaded a scheduler PDF and would rather it sit in Notebooks instead of floating around my Library section.

[tomsem]

Got my Scribe today, a couple of days earlier than expected.

I find the 'floating' pen toolbar annoying and distracting. Why not match the background color at least? As it is, I want to be able to hide the toolbar and have Pen function default to Select mode, just as if I were using a finger.

And until other Kindles and the Kindle apps let you at least view Sticky Notes, I don't see the point in creating any. So most likely I'll just store the Pen where it won't get damaged or lost.

I sent a PDF to see what everyone's complaining about. It's bad! Very bad! I was prepared to expect some degradation in functionality with the conversion they're doing, but I cannot even search, select text and highlight it, no dictionary lookup, no VoiceOver (at least partially supported), which you could do before when it stayed a PDF. Even though I'm not planning to mark up these fake PDFs, I expected to have these basic reading features. Beaucoup Boos, Bezos! (I know he isn't CEO any more but could not resist alliterating.)

[it seems to me that these 'fake PDFs' are essentially fixed layout KF8 -- at least they behave that way -- the text is not accessible, even though it is 'there' in the HTML. I bought one of these recently and was able to tweak a few things that were misaligned when I converted to PDF]

On the plus side:
- handwriting feels natural and low latency (should I ever want to do any)
- I think I will be comfortable reading on it; I had to bump size up a little from my usual setting to reduce words per line, but not by too much.
- the so called 'gap' is pretty even on all 4 sides
- happy with what I paid for it (discount plus trade-in), and no special offers to remove.
- happy that ePub personal documents have 'enhanced typography' features (presume this will be the case with other Kindles and apps at some point?)

It's not pure joy (which I was not expecting), but for now I'm leaning towards keeping it.

[Zimmy]

Opened my Scribe case this morning to a blank screen. I can't get to display anything.
Any suggestions? Since it only has one button, I'm guessing to hold it, but for how long?
I see the screen flash and the the light comes on when charging.
---
Update, the good old holding the button until the screen flashes reset everything.