Scanned PDFs on Kindle Scribe

The Scribe changes which problem you have

On a 6-inch Kindle, the first complaint about a scanned book is that the print is tiny. On a Scribe it mostly isn’t. Amazon’s current line-up, the Kindle Scribe, Kindle Scribe Colorsoft and a Scribe without a front light, all have an 11-inch screen. A 6 × 9 inch paperback page measures about 10.8 inches corner to corner, so it fits at close to the size it was printed.

What’s left is everything a scan carries besides the words:

• pale, grey or yellow paper that turns murky on e-ink
• a dark edge from the scanner and a shadow down the spine
• no text under the page, so search, highlights and look-up don’t work
• a file big enough to stall Send to Kindle
• for larger books, such as a textbook or an atlas, the same small-print problem the smaller Kindles have

The handwriting rule that catches people out

The Scribe is bought to write on, and here a scanned book is like any other PDF. Amazon’s help page on writing on PDFs says you can write directly on the page, and it lists handwritten sticky notes among the options. It also says handwriting isn’t supported in PDFs:

• loaded via USB-C, or
• sent to your library before 11 November 2022.

So the cable, which is the usual way round a size limit, takes away the pen. If you want to write on the book, it has to go through Send to Kindle, and that means fitting it under the limits.

That last row comes from Amazon’s announcement; we haven’t checked a file-size limit for it.

Making room to write

On a small Kindle you crop right to the text. On a Scribe you may want the opposite.

Best suited for: students and researchers who annotate as they read.

• For reading: crop to the printed block plus a sliver of white. The type gets bigger and nothing on the page is lost.
• For writing in the margin: cut only the scanner edge, the spine shadow and any desk round the page, and keep the book’s own margin.
• For heavy notes: keep the page tight and use sticky notes instead, so the text stays large and the notes stay out of the way.

Whichever you pick, do it before you write a word. A cleaned copy is a new file, and your handwriting stays on the old one.

Preparing a scanned book for the Scribe

1. Upload the scanned PDF or DjVu to FixMyScan. Up to 1,000 pages.
2. Set the crop with your note-taking in mind. You draw it once over 50 pages laid on top of each other, and it applies to every page.
3. Let the clean-up run. Text pages go to black on white, illustrated pages stay greyscale, crooked pages are levelled and two-page scans are split.
4. Let the OCR run. A hidden text layer goes under each page, so you can search and highlight.
5. Send the PDF through Send to Kindle. Not the cable, if you want to write on it.

Page numbers and page order don’t change. A note you write on page 112 sits on the same page 112 as the printed book.

Search on a scanned PDF

A Scribe can search a PDF only if the PDF has text in it. Amazon’s Scribe pages that we checked don’t say whether the device recognises text on scanned pages, so we don’t claim it either way. If you add the text layer to the file yourself, you know search will work, on the Scribe and on your computer.

What this won’t do

FixMyScan doesn’t turn your handwriting into text, and it can’t move notes from an old copy of the file to a new one. It reads printed text, not handwritten pages. It keeps the book as a PDF and doesn’t reflow it.

FixMyScan is not affiliated with Amazon.

Questions