You can order your Kindle without special offers or just pay the $20 later on the device to turn them off. It costs an additional $20 to turn off the special offers. There are also small ad banners at the bottom of the main navigation screen. With special offers enabled, the screensaver on your Kindle when it’s turned off is an ad for a book, and to turn the Kindle on you’ve got to press the power button and then swipe the touchscreen to dismiss the ad. The base prices of each Kindle model include “special offers”, which is Amazon’s euphemism for advertising. (You can probably even check out books from your local library to your Kindle using a service such as OverDrive!) A word about Kindle pricingĪmazon’s pricing model for the Kindle is complicated. If you are someone who reads a lot, consider buying a Kindle.

When I’m out and about without a Kindle, I’ll read books on my iPhone, but when I get home I’m right back to the dedicated reading device. When I’m using my Kindle, I am reading, not grazing the internet. You won’t be tempted to flip over to Twitter or get bugged by a push notification or an incoming FaceTime call. What’s more, these devices are unitaskers. If you’ve ever tried to read a book while sitting in the sun at the pool, you can see why this sort of display is a perfect match for this category. But they’re relatively low resolution and can only display black, white, and shades of gray, so they’re inappropriate for much more than text on a page. These screens have some huge advantages: They use very little power, and they’re extremely readable in bright light. These are reflective screens-like ink on paper, you read them by light reflected off their surface, rather than light shining in from behind like those other screens. Not so! If you’ve never used an ebook reader before, you may not realize that their screens are dramatically different from computer, phone, and tablet screens. Why Kindle?Ī lot of people think the entire dedicated ebook reader category has been made obsolete by tablets and smartphones. The base-model Kindle is much harder to write off than it was before, but I think the Paperwhite still has a better combination of features for most users. Both of them are notable improvements on their previous versions, making it harder for me to declare which Kindle you should buy.

In the last few months Amazon has released two new Kindles, the $130 Kindle Paperwhite and the $90 base-model Kindle. Warning: This story has not been updated in several years and may contain out-of-date information. Review: Kindle Paperwhite (2019) and Kindle (2019)

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