Kindle Scribe: using PDF files as notebooks?

[BionicGecko]

With the latest firmware update Amazon has finally brought the new AI features to UK accounts, so I’ve been looking into integrating those into my workflow. I often have to review technical documents in PDF format, so I send them to my Scribe and write notes directly on the page and in the margins. I would like to use the AI tools to summarize those notes in text format, however it seems that the tools are only available for notebooks (the icon doesn’t show up in PDFs).

Is there a way to transform PDF files to somehow be able to use them as notebooks? When creating a new notebook, several background templates are available, so one could imagine having a document as such a “background”, perhaps just as an image. I understand I would lose the PDF search features, but that’s a price I’d be willing to pay.

Does anyone have any idea on how to achieve this?

[jhowell]

It might be possible but would require significant effort.

Notebook templates are a hard coded set of single page KVG (Amazon’s proprietary version of SVG) files. There is currently no mechanism for replacing them and even if there was you would then need to select the proper template for each notebook page derived from each individual page of your PDF one-by-one.

It might be possible to extract a notebook from a Scribe over USB, automatically replace the embedded page templates with KVG files derived from the individual pages of the PDF, and return the updated notebook to the device. There is currently no software to generate KVG or perform that sort of replacement. Reverse engineering would be needed to figure out how to do that with no guarantee that it would actually work in the end.

[BionicGecko]

Many thanks jhowell for the detailed explanation, this confirms my suspicions. I don’t think I have it in me to reverse engineer the files, so I’ll just keep my fingers crossed and hope that Amazon brings the AI features to PDF - although I don’t have much faith they will.

[Frogm4n]

You can lasso select and copy-paste your writing from the PDF and over into a Notebook, and then use the Notebook AI features from there. You do need to remember to select a pen style after making the selection so that you don't immediately end up pasting right back into the document.

[BionicGecko]

Ah yes that’s a good workaround, at least for small documents. Thank you for sharing this!

[jhowell]

It might be easier to just make your notes on a piece of paper while reading the PDF, take a photo with your phone, and feed it to an AI app.

[BionicGecko]

Indeed… kind of defeats the purpose of owning a Scribe though