The Amazon Kindle Scribe was an attempt to release an e-notebook to take on established players in the game, such as Remarkable, Rakuten Kobo, Onyx Boox and Supernote. Amazon was serious about the Scribe, releasing firmware updates every few months to add new functionality and address bugs. With the advent of Scribe 2, which will be released next month, many first-generation Scribe users wonder if they should upgrade.

Amazon has announced that the 1st generation Scribe will gain many of the features found on the Scribe 2. With the Scribe 1, you can write in ebooks, but they should be up as pop-up sticky notes. This will all change with the advent of Active Canvas. Active Canvas, which finally adds some in-book notetaking to the Scribe experience. According to Techradar: Active Canvas is simple. If you want to annotate a book, you can start writing right at the top of the section in the book. As you write, the text under where you’re writing fades away, and then a box appears, and the book text automatically flows around it. You select a check to set the box, which you can then resize, but more importantly, that annotation remains anchored to the text in the book. I watched an Amazon rep resize the font, and the annotation held fast.

Another new note-taking option, to be made available in the months after release, will let users write notes in the on-screen side panel, with the ability to hide or show them afterward. It’s called Extended Margin. A new feature for the Kindle Scribe uses generative AI to summarize handwritten notes, condensing them into bullets in a script font format that can be shared from the notebook tab. All of these features will hit the Scribe1 in early 2025. All of these features will be available on the Scribe 2 at launch.