Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cal85 1324 days ago
I bought a Remarkable 2 - the UI design wasn’t there for me yet and I only persisted with it for a few days, but I am a big believer in the product category and would certainly give the next one a try. However, I think it will be forever niche. Not many people have any interest in writing by hand, and of those that do, only an few are so keen on digital organisation that they would buy one of these. It seems like a permanently small (but well heeled and discerning) target market, something for boutique tech companies to focus on, not giants. So I find it weird that Amazon is targeting this market at all - I don’t see how they plan to grow it into something big enough for them to care about. I feel like Kindle Scribe might just be an experiment that they will kill in a few years.

Anyone got any thoughts on this? Does Amazon have some big strategy that I’m missing here? How do they plan to persuade large numbers of people to buy into digital handwriting?

2 comments

> Anyone got any thoughts on this? Does Amazon have some big strategy that I’m missing here? How do they plan to persuade large numbers of people to buy into digital handwriting?

Have you use office 365 or onenote? An iPad with the Apple pen recently? Any digital notes are organized by default, the latency and poor refresh rate makes eink impossible for replacing notebooks to me, but an LCD works great. Handwriting is already mainstream, as is using it on computer.

If you’re asking about Amazon most buyers of kindle fall between either upgrading every cycle and never using it, never upgrading their kindle keyboard, or more commonly never used it more than 3hr in total. Kindle sales are going to be good either way since type 1 buyers love tech for tech.

They've got a bigger screened Kindle, and included a pen with it.

They don't need to convince anyone to start taking notes on their Kindles, they just need to get people who want larger screens for reading to get them. Pen is a nice extra. And sure, there's 10% (pulled out of my behind, citation missing) of Scribe buyers who'd get it for note taking.

reMarkable is probably rightfully concerned since Amazon can easily outprice them, which they are already doing.