Below is a YouTube video showing the new features that Amazon added to the Kindle Scribe with the latest software update that was released last week.
The 5.16.1.3 update is the second firmware update that Amazon has released for the Kindle Scribe since it was released in late November of last year.
The update essentially added three new features, including a contrast adjustment slider to darken text on PDFs sent to the Kindle Scribe using Send to Kindle (sideloaded PDFs already had this feature), but other features like dictionary lookup still aren’t available with sent PDFs, only sideloaded PDFs, so they still have some work to do.
They also added two-column mode for ebooks, including ebooks that you send to your Kindle Scribe, not just ebooks purchased from Amazon. Note that you have to switch to landscape mode before you can enable the two-column layout, and it works with all font sizes.
The last thing the update added is something called Notebook Overview, where you can view multiple notebook pages at once (up to 9) to rearrange their order and insert and delete individual pages.
Amazon says the Kindle Scribe will be getting a text conversion feature with an upcoming update, along with a lasso editing tool to move, copy, and resize notes, so those are a couple of things to look forward to in the near future. They also finally started rolling out support for sending Word documents to Kindles from within Microsoft Word.
It’s good to see they’re continuing to add new features to the Scribe at a steady pace (however, it seems like other Kindles are getting the back seat now). The previous update added new pen types, some with support for pressure sensitivity, along with subfolders to help organize Notebooks, and it also added new screen savers exclusive to the Kindle Scribe.
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