Amazon just made it easier to take notes on your Kindle Scribe

The first Amazon Scribe e-reader launched in 2022, and a major complaint about Amazon’s large-and-in-charge note-taking E Ink tablet was that its software was too barebones compared to the competition like Boox, Supernote, and Remarkable. Amazon spent the next few years pushing updates with new features, but it took the launch of the new Scribe to bring note-taking to Amazon’s store-bought e-books, and the implementation still left something to be desired.

There’s a new side panel for both Kindle Scribe models

Taking notes is easier than ever

Do you see that little icon in the upper right corner of the first-generation Kindle Scribe displayed in the image above? This is how you access the new side panel for both the new Kindle Scribe that recently launched at the tail of last year as well as the older model from 2022. This is a new feature included with the new 5.17.3 firmware (which you can grab here to manually install), and it’s incredibly easy to use, allowing you to attach notes to any highlighted text in your e-book.

Once you click the side panel button a side panel pops out. But you can’t start writing yet, you need to highlight some text. Once you find a passage worth creating a note for, whip out your pen and start writing.

You can even pin a note to a page so that it pops up automatically when you tap the side panel button. Overall, it’s nice to see Amazon working on new ways to create notes in our e-books, store-bought or sideloaded, especially when some of the old ways didn’t work with every book. Let’s hope Amazon can keep up the pace and bring even more features to the Scribe before users do it for them, as it is a fine platform that just needs a bit more polish to really shine.