Write On eBooks have arrived (sort of)

The most recent update for the Kindle Scribe promised better PDF handling and ebooks that could be directly written on. I have finally managed to find the section of the Kindle store selling some of these books.

The Write On eBook section of the store was not easy to find and may indeed be a beta or placeholder section. The section only contains 59 books. The books are divided into three categories: Crosswords, Sudoku, and Guided Journals. These are all types of books where being able to write on them would be essential. I purchased Pocket Posh Easy Sudoku 7 as a test and the title worked great on my Kindle Scribe. (See picture.)

page with Sudoku puzzle

One caveat as you consider buying any titles: There does not seem to be a “Look Inside This Book” preview option for any of the titles. Because of this, I highly recommend downloading a sample first to check the content and formatting. Also (and probably most importantly), you cannot write on any of the sample books. This is probably to prevent people from downloading samples and working free crosswords and sudoku puzzles.

The guided journal downloads especially seem to need to be approached with caution. I downloaded one sample that in the greyscale of the Scribe, had pages so dark that reading your writing on them would be very difficult. Unlike the Remarkable tablet, the Scribe does not yet have pen colors so you do not have the option of white or grey on a dark page.

Hopefully, Amazon will expand the offers of Write On titles. I am a puzzle fan and would love to see logic puzzles, word search and other types of puzzle books available for the Scribe. I also own a first generation Remarkable tablet and there is a vibrant third-party market for day planners, to-do lists, as well as various types of gratitude and guided journals.

Many Remarkable users make their own templates and the addition of Send to Kindle function to Microsoft Word may make it easier to do this for the Scribe.

I did a search of the KDP guidelines to see if Amazon had given any information for self-publishing Write On titles but couldn’t find anything on formatting Write On ebooks. This seems like a category with a lot of opportunities for Indie authors, especially as journaling is incredibly popular right now.

I’ll be writing more about this as more books and information become available.