Amazon’s Kindle Scribe is pen-centric hardware let down by book-centric software

The pen (and compatibility with other pens)

The Scribe's pen accessory has a lot in common with the Apple Pencil 2—a matte, lightly grippy texture, one flat side for your thumb to rest against while you're holding it, and magnets inside that let it attach to the side of the Scribe when you're not using it. The magnets are plenty firm and the pen feels secure on the side of the tablet, but Amazon's case also includes a pen storage loop if you really want to keep it secure.

Amazon offers both a Basic and Premium Pen option with the Scribe; both attach to the device with magnets, but only the Premium Pen has a side button or an eraser on top. By default, the shortcut button is used to turn on the highlighter function, though it can also be set to turn on the eraser function or drop a sticky note (more on the limitations of these inputs in a bit).

Writing with the pen feels fast and fluid, and the pen's tip slides smoothly across the Scribe's screen—you can feel a small amount of resistance from the matte surface that makes it feel appreciably more paper-esque than an Apple Pencil or Surface Pen gliding across a glassy tablet screen. I can sense the faintest bit of delay between when the pen makes contact with the screen and when the stroke appears, but for a tablet focused mostly on handwriting instead of art, it's not really a problem. There's a more noticeable delay with the highlighter and eraser functions, though, as the device briefly pauses between strokes to integrate whatever edits you made into your note or document.

If you're trying to decide between the two pens, the Premium Pen's shortcut button is good, but I don't love how its eraser feels; you have to apply some pressure to get the eraser to activate—enough that I would worry about scratching or otherwise damaging the Scribe's screen with it in the long term.

The Kindle Scribe pen is even more similar to the reMarkable 2 's Marker Plus accessory (which costs more than twice as much)—so similar, in fact, that the two styluses are essentially interchangeable. Both have a shallow divot on the flat side for magnetically attaching to the tablets' sides, and both pens can be used to write on both tablets. Even the eraser on the Marker Plus worked on the Scribe.

That's because both tablets use a Wacom technology called electromagnetic resistance (EMR)—it's a sensor layer that "emits a weak electromagnetic signal" that powers the pen accessories when they come within its range.

This is why the Scribe and reMarkable pens both work interchangeably with no charging or pairing. And it's why any old EMR or reMarkable-compatible stylus you buy will work fine with the Scribe (though we didn't test whether side buttons on third-party styluses would also work since the reMarkable marker doesn't have one). We tried some non-EMR devices just to see what happened, and the Surface Slim Pen, Apple Pencil, Apple Pencil 2, and a cheap plastic Nintendo DS stylus were all ignored by the Scribe.