The Best Digital Notebooks You Can Buy in 2026

The Boox Note Air 5C, released in late 2025, is only a marginal upgrade from the Boox Note Air 4C, my previous pick for the best bet for most people—but given it's the same price and adds magnetic pins to support a detachable keyboard case ($110, sold separately) and runs Android 15 (instead of the Note Air 4C's Android 13), it's an easy decision. The 10.3-inch screen is large enough to serve as a usable workspace, but not so large that you have to worry about portability. The writing experience is typical of e-paper devices with EMR (electromagnetic resonance) styluses, which is to say pretty good (I'd liken it the feel of using a felt-tipped marker pen on paper), and the native Notes app offers a ton of options for creating and organizing your writing and documents. The front-lit color e-ink screen makes it a good pick if you want a device that can double as a capable e-reader for both books and comics, and the open Android operating system runs the Google Play store out of the box, so you can download all of your favorite productivity apps.

If you're the kind of person who is constantly saying "let me throw that into ChatGPT," the AiPaper—the first device from ViWoods, a relatively new player in the market—is a strong bet. It's pleasant to write on, it offers some of the best organizational and productivity tools of any device on the market and, after messing with the settings, it can be configured to access the Google Play store to run your favorite reading and work apps. But what truly sets it apart is the smart way it integrates ChatGPT-4o into all of its native apps, so you can ask the chatbot to draft emails, summarize a document, and more at a tap.

If you want the biggest writeable screen you can get, they don't come any bigger than the 13.3-inch Boox Note Max. It offers a premium build, the same great writing experience and features as my top choice, the Note Air 4C, but minus the front light and color display. These sound like downsides, but removing that extra tech only serves to make the Note Max's screen crisper and your connection to what you're writing or drawing more immediate. (If color and lighting are really important to you, consider the newer Boox Tab X C, which has both—but a different stylus that might not be for everyone.)

Though I think the Note Air 4C is the best digital notebook for most people, the Supernote Manta is the one I'd choose for myself. In contrast to competing devices from Boox and Viwoods, the Manta doesn't run apps out of the box—by design, this thing is built to be a replacement for your pen and paper notebook. As such, it's all about the writing experience, and writing with the Supernote's ceramic-tipped stylus is a joy. While the functionality is a bit basic for a modern tablet—the focus is on writing, drawing, and organizing your files—it's kind of nice to use a device that flawlessly executes on its intended goals: removing distractions and leaving you alone with a pen, a surface to write on, and your thoughts.

A close competitor to the Supernote Manta, the reMarkable Paper Pro (a larger, updated version of the excellent reMarkable 2) likewise foregrounds writing and productivity, but with a few interesting twists. For one thing, it has a front-lit color display that uses E Ink's Gallery 3 screen tech, which can display 20,000 colors to the Boox Note Air 4C's 4,060. For note-taking and drawing, it offers a unique "infinite canvas" that allows you to create endlessly scrolling documents that you can organize via tagging. And I'm particularly impressed with its cloud integrations, which allow you to edit files on both the Paper Pro and your laptop—though doing so does require a subscription.

If the Boox Note Air 4C is too pricey for you, you might also consider it's younger, smaller brother, the Boox Go Color 7. In many ways, it mirrors the capabilities and features of that more expensive device, but shrinks things down considerably with a portable, comfortable 7-inch screen that also makes it a great color e-reader. For an extra $50, you can get the supported InkSense USI 2.0 stylus so it can also serve as a pocket notebook of sorts. The pen is different and the writing experience can't compare to what you get with the Note Air 4C, but it's also the best option at this size and price point. (Also available in a black-and-white only version, the Boox Go 7.)

When I reviewed the 2024 Kindle Scribe, I found it to be a capable digital notebook if all you're looking for is a place to take notes or keep a journal. However, the 2025 version, released in December 2025, offers a more robust productivity experience with additional AI-powered tools, like AI search, in addition to the older model's transcription and summary capabilities, plus better integration for third-party services like OneDrive and Google Drive. There's also a new "Send to Alexa+" feature that allows you to transfer your notes to Amazon's LLM for analysis. Otherwise, it's largely the same device with a new design, a larger screen, and a higher price point (starting at $500 with 32GB of storage). The writing experience with the included Premium Pen is still top tier, and it's still a great large e-reader, but it's the best choice only if you are OK being locked to Amazon's ecosystem.

If you can't bring yourself to give up the versatility of a traditional backlit tablet screen, the XP-Pen Magic Note Pad is a nice stop-gap: It's like a Kindle and an iPad had a baby. Its TLC NXTPAPER display has an etched surface to reduce glare as well as three different color modes, controlled at the operating system level, that ostensibly take it from full color LED tablet to something that more closely resembles a black and white e-reader. It comes with an outstanding stylus that's more than four times as sensitive as an Apple Pencil (or any of the others I've written about here, for that matter), making it a particularly good choice for artists; though I find the slippery feel less than ideal for note-taking, it will get the job done.