Kindle Scribe is Amazon's first e-reader to feature a digital pen

What you need to know

• Kindle Scribe will be the first Amazon Kindle e-reader that delivers a digital pen experience.
• You'll be able to take notes, make to-do lists, draw, annotate books, sign PDFs, and more with the battery-free digital pen.
• Kindle Scribe will come with an ecosystem of accessories, including covers, choice of basic or premium pens, and stands. 
• It ships with a 10.2-inch e-ink display that lasts for weeks, not hours or days, according to Amazon, with a resolution of 300 PPI.

Amazon is ready to take on traditional tablets, like Microsoft's Surface Pro 8 and Apple's iPad Pro, with its latest e-reader: Kindle Scribe. As its name implies, Kindle Scribe ships with a digital pen that allows you to take notes, draw, doodle, sign PDFs, and more. 

Unlike the Surface Pro 8 or the iPad Pro, Kindle Scribe is not about apps, as Amazon is looking to expand its e-reading experience with digital note-taking. 

“Kindle Scribe is the best Kindle we’ve ever built, creating a reading and writing experience that feels like real paper,” Kevin Keith, vice president of Amazon Devices, said in a prepared statement. “It's inspired by the Kindle customers who have added billions of notes and highlights to books over the years, and it’s also ideal for reviewing and marking up documents, managing your to-do list, or doodling over a big idea. Plus, it offers all the Kindle benefits customers know and love—millions of books on demand, adjustable fonts, premium reading features, and weeks and weeks of battery life—with the benefit of a beautiful, large display.”

This makes Kindle Scribe not only a challenger to the Surface Pro and the iPad Pro for note-taking and document signing, but the latest member of Amazon's Kindle family will also take on dedicated e-ink tablets, like the Remarkable slate. 

The Scribe uses a 10.2-inch e-ink display, which Amazon claims continues to maintain its weeks-long class-leading battery life for digital displays, with a resolution of 300 pixels-per-inch. The display is front-lit and is glare-free for eye comfort during long reading sessions. The front light can auto-adjust based on the environment around you.

To take notes, Amazon will offer two pen experiences, and shoppers can choose a premium or basic pen option. The pens can attach to the Kindle Scribe via magnets, and there is no need to worry about recharging the pens. Documents can be uploaded to the Scribe via the Send-to-Kindle experience, and Amazon promises a future update that will allow you to sync Microsoft Word documents to Kindle Scribe seamlessly.

Amazon will offer various templates that will allow you to create to-do lists, tracking tasks, and take notes in a notebook with lined or unlined pages.

Kindle Scribe is available for pre-order today starting at $339, and it will be available in 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB storage capacities. Amazon will also offer a host of accessories, including covers, for the Kindle Scribe.

In addition to Scribe, Amazon also announced updates to its Echo line of smart speakers and the company launched a new contact-less bedside sleep tracker called Halo Rise that uses advanced machine learning to analyze your sleep patterns.