I’m also crossing my fingers that the whole sync situation will improve because right now it is goofy as hell. To get articles and other documents on the Scribe, you email your Kindle and wait for it to receive the files, which it automatically loads into your library alongside any books (or comics) you might already own. But it doesn’t actually sync any notes you make to the Kindle app on your phone or the web. So annotations disappear when you open the same PDF on your phone. Notebooks do sync, but you can’t add to them on your phone or other device — only read them. And if you’re hoping to instantly convert your handwriting to text… seek another device. The Scribe doesn’t do that. Given Amazon is one of the largest and most successful cloud computing companies in the world, it’s stunningly goofy how poorly this whole process works.
Alex Cranz
Sending articles and various documents to Kindle devices has always been sort of a hassle – and retrieving your notes and highlights equally frustrating, as for documents you can only do that by physically linking the device to a desktop and manually copying the master Clippings file. For the past few months I have started using a newer webapp called Push to Kindle to send articles from to the web to my Kindle. It works much more reliably than Amazon’s Send to Kindle extension, and has additional options, such as excluding images to reduce the file size. This doesn’t unfortunately do anything to improve the second part of the process, accessing the notes from the device.
Ideally, Amazon would launch its own service covering both use cases, something akin to Instapaper, where you could simply drop a link and it would sync the article contents to read on the Kindle. And with each sync it would also upload highlights, notes, and the reading progress, and display them in the web interface alongside the original article text, or in a dedicated list to parse them more quickly. Perhaps there are copyright issues here preventing them from going forward – or maybe Amazon is just slow to update Kindle’s software experience because of its dominant position on the e-book market.
As for the device itself, I have little interest on a bigger Kindle for handwritten notes. I am reasonably content to use it as a dedicated reading device, and this larger size would make it more uncomfortable to carry around on the subway or to slide it in the hand luggage alongside many other gadgets for a trip on the airplane. But if this more feature-rich Kindle finally convinces Amazon to improve document syncing for all Kindles, that would be a win for everyone.
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