Kindle Scribe vs reMarkable for PDFs

Side by side, from the makers’ own pages

Most comparisons of these two cover handwriting feel, notebooks and battery. This one covers the PDF: getting it on, fitting it to the screen, and writing on it. Every row comes from Amazon’s or reMarkable’s own pages, and where they don’t say, the table says so.

Getting a big PDF onto each

This is where scanned books bite. A grey scan of a long book can run to hundreds of megabytes.

• On the Scribe, the Send to Kindle website takes up to 200 MB, and email up to 50 MB. The cable has no published limit, but Amazon’s help says handwriting isn’t supported on PDFs loaded over USB-C. If you want to write on the book, the 200 MB web limit is the real ceiling.
• On a reMarkable, the web app and USB both stop at 100 MB. The mobile and desktop apps are reMarkable’s answer for anything bigger, with no maximum stated.

So the Scribe takes more in a browser, and the reMarkable takes more through its app. Either way, a cleaned black-and-white copy of a scan is far smaller than the grey original, which makes the question mostly go away.

Fitting the page to the screen

A PDF has a fixed page, and a scan’s page includes margins, scanner edges and the spine shadow. How much each device lets you adjust that on screen differs.

reMarkable documents Adjust view: open the PDF, tap Document settings, then Adjust view, and choose Fit to width, Fit to height or a custom view that you pinch and pan into place. reMarkable says the setting applies to every page in that document.

We didn’t find a matching feature on the Amazon pages we checked, so we don’t claim one either way. Check the reading settings on your own Scribe’s software.

On both, an on-screen view is not the same as fixing the file. The view doesn’t whiten grey paper, doesn’t add text, and doesn’t follow a book that drifts on the scanner glass from page to page.

Writing on a scanned book

Both devices are bought to write on, and both let you write on PDFs. The difference is in the rules:

• Amazon says Scribe handwriting doesn’t work on PDFs loaded over USB-C or sent to the library before 11 November 2022. It also lists handwritten sticky notes as an option on PDFs.
• reMarkable’s import guide places no such rule on PDFs that arrive by USB, the web or the apps.

On either device, your notes belong to the file you wrote them on. Swap in a cleaned copy halfway through a book and the notes stay behind on the old one. So clean the scan before the first note.

Which one for scanned PDFs?

Best suited for: people choosing a device mainly to read and mark up scanned books.

Whichever you pick, fix the file

The device decides how much page you see. The file decides whether that page is worth seeing. A scan cleaned once reads well on either:

1. Crop the margins once for the whole book, leaving room to write if you want it.
2. Turn the paper white and the print black, keeping pictures in greyscale.
3. Add a hidden text layer so you can search and highlight.

FixMyScan does all three in one upload, for books up to 1,000 pages, and keeps every page in place, so a note on page 58 matches page 58 of the printed book.

FixMyScan is not affiliated with Amazon or reMarkable.

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