Everyone has that one drawer. You know the one, filled with half-used notebooks, dried-out pens, and scrap paper with to-do lists that stopped making sense around March 2022. I found myself staring into that drawer last month and realized I’d been solving the wrong problem. Instead ofOrganizing better, I needed a better tool. That’s when I went down the rabbit hole of digital notebooks, and honestly, I’m still not sure I’ve climbed out.
This isn’t a new category. E Ink tablets have been around for years, and WIRED has been tracking them closely. But something shifted recently. The devices got better, the prices crept up, and now we’re at a point where spending $400 on what amounts to a fancy e-ink notepad feels almost reasonable. Almost.
The Ones Worth Your Attention
If you’re actually going to buy one of these, there are two that keep showing up in recommendations everywhere, and for good reason. The ReMarkable Paper Pro sits at the top of the pile at $629, and it earns that spot. The screen feels like actual matte paper, the writing latency is practically nonexistent, and the color option actually looks useful rather than like a gimmick. It’s got a built-in light that pulls from ambient room lighting, which sounds like a gimmick until you’re trying to write on a dimmed flight at 2 AM and realize you can actually see what you’re doing.
Then there’s the Amazon Kindle Scribe, now in its second generation at $400. Here’s the thing about the Scribe: it’s not the best digital notebook. Not even close. But it is the best e-reader that accidentally takes notes, and if you’re already in the Kindle ecosystem like half the planet, that integration matters more than any feature spreadsheet. The battery life is absurd, like 12 weeks absurd, which means you can actually forget about charging it and still have it work when you remember it exists.
I keep coming back to this tension in the category. These devices are trying to solve for two different people. The person who wants to read books and occasionally jot something in the margin needs something totally different from the person who’s replacing a lifetime of Moleskines with pixels. The ReMarkable line leans hard into the latter. The Scribe leans into the former. Neither is wrong, but they definitely aren’t the same thing.
The Underdogs Worth Knowing About
Now here’s where it gets interesting. The big players get all the attention, but some of the smaller names are doing things differently.
Kobo made a quiet comeback in this space with the Libra Colour. It’s small, it’s color, and it’s priced at $260 after a recent price increase that honestly makes me want to wait for a sale. The color annotating works, the stylus has an eraser on the back that actually deletes entire objects with one tap, and if you’re someone who reads a lot of ebooks and want to underline passages in different colors, this might actually be better than the ReMarkable for that specific use case. The trade-off is the screen size. It’s small. Like, my handwriting looked cramped small. But for quick notes and margin annotations on books, it genuinely works.
Then there’s Supernote, which keeps a cult following that I think is warranted. Their A5 X2 Manta starts to feel like a real contender when you factor in the pens. I’ll just say it: the LAMY Safari Vista EMR pen they offer is genuinely one of the best writing experiences I’ve ever had, digital or otherwise. It looks like a real pen, feels like a real pen, and I’ve actually caught myself trying to write with it on paper notebooks because I forgot it wasn’t a regular pen. That’s either a testament to the design or a sign I need more sleep. Maybe both.
And for the budget-conscious or the commitment-phobic, the Rocketbook Fusion Plus at $30 deserves a mention. It’s a reusable notebook. You write with a Pilot Frixion pen, scan the pages into an app, then wipe it clean with a damp cloth. It’s not digital in the way these E Ink devices are, but if the thing holding you back is the price tag, this is a legitimate alternative that requires zero charging and no software updates.
What Nobody Tells You
Here’s the thing the marketing doesn’t say: these devices are expensive because the technology is genuinely hard. E Ink screens that respond to pressure-sensitive styluses in real time whileLooking good in varying light conditions aren’t cheap to make. The software ecosystems around them require constant maintenance. These aren’t iPads with a paper screen bolted on; they require entirely different engineering approaches.
That said, the price increases are getting harder to justify. ReMarkable raised the price of the Paper Pro recently. Supernote went up about $50. Kobo added $10. At some point, you’re in AirPods Pro territory price-wise, and you start wondering if you’d just be happier with a basic iPad and the GoodNotes app. That’s a legitimate question, and honestly, for a lot of people, the answer is yes. An iPad does more, costs less, and has a significantly larger app ecosystem behind it.
But there’s a difference worth acknowledging. The battery on an E Ink device lasts weeks, not days. The reading experience doesn’t strain your eyes the same way. And there’s something about the focused, almost boring nature of these devices that’s actually the feature, not the bug. You can’t doom-scroll on a ReMarkable. You can’t get distracted by notifications on a Kindle Scribe. Sometimes limitation is the point.
So What Actually Works
After looking through what WIRED’s tested and what keeps showing up in real-world use, the honest answer is: it depends entirely on what you actually want to do with it.
If you want a digital notebook that genuinely feels like paper and you’re okay spending real money to get that experience, the Paper Pro is still the best overall package. If you already live in Kindle’s world and want the option to annotating without switching devices, the second-gen Scribe at $400 remains the sweet spot. If you want color and annotation on ebooks specifically and don’t need a full notetaking system, the Kobo Libra Colour is worth waiting for on sale. And if you’re a pen enthusiast who doesn’t need a keyboard attachment, Supernote’s ecosystem is uniquely good.
But nobody needs one of these. That’s the truth nobody in marketing wants to say out loud. A notebook and a pen costs $5 and never needs a firmware update. These are luxuries dressed up as productivity tools, and that’s okay. I use mine all the time, and I still think that’s true.
The question isn’t whether these devices are good. Many of them are genuinely excellent at what they set out to do. The question is whether the gap between “good enough” and “this is my new daily driver” is worth a few hundred dollars to you. That answer is different for everyone, and honestly, it might be different for you next year than it is today.
