Product5 publishers3 min readPublished
Amazon bundles ad removal with aluminum on its new Kindle and Paperwhite
Amazon's ad-free base Kindle costs $190 in aluminum with 32GB, $40 above the plastic model that shows lock-screen ads. On the Paperwhite the step is $50, so as listed, dropping the ads also buys metal and double the storage.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- The $250 Paperwhite Signature Edition also adds an auto-brightness sensor, landscape rotation, a double-tap page turn and pogo pins for Amazon's $60 dock.
- Keith says 60 to 65 percent of people buying new Kindles have never owned one before.
- The base Kindle is on sale now, and Tom's Guide says the Paperwhite and Colorsoft arrive October 28.
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Why it matters
- decision Family or office buyers who object only to the ads now have to sign off on a $40 or $50 hardware upgrade per device to get rid of them, as the lineup is listed.
- exposure Amazon's lock-screen ads sit on the entry models, so their audience is likely to lean toward the first-time buyers Keith says make up most new-device sales.
- contradiction Amazon's faster page-turn claim sits against PCMag's finding of unchanged displays, so an owner of a recent Kindle is mostly paying for a new body.
Someone ordering their first Kindle this week is choosing between two base models that, according to PCMag, share one design apart from the aluminum back on the pricier one [5]. The cheaper one shows ads on its lock screen [1].
WIRED called the aluminum build the highlight of the refresh [20]. The price list is more specific about what buyers pay for. On both the base Kindle and the Paperwhite, the plastic model carries lock-screen ads and the aluminum model does not, and the aluminum model also doubles storage to 32GB [1][2]. That makes the $40 and $50 steps a bundle of ad removal, metal and storage [1][2]. The sources do not say whether Amazon still sells ad removal on its own, or whether the $290 plastic Colorsoft shows ads at all [3].
The ad-supported tier is the entry point, and most buyers are entering. Kevin Keith, Amazon's vice president of product, told WIRED that 60 to 65 percent of people buying new devices have never had a Kindle before [9]. He blamed parts for the prices. "Memory pricing is a little bit crazy," Keith said [7]. Amazon raised prices on existing Kindles earlier this year, and the new models match them [8]. Memory is also the part that doubles when a buyer moves up a tier [5][2].
Amazon's own figures describe a narrower buyer for the extras. The company says around 5 percent of Kindle users still love physical page-turn buttons [10]. It sells them two ways: an $80 Page-Turn Cover that connects only through the Signature Edition's pogo pins, and a $35 Bluetooth Kindle Click for non-Signature and older models [10][11]. A Paperwhite Signature Edition with the cover costs $330, against $235 for a plain Paperwhite and a Click [4].
For anyone upgrading from a recent Kindle, the screen is the open point. Amazon says the base Kindle turns pages 30 percent faster than its predecessor [13]. PCMag found the E Ink displays unchanged and wrote that "what you read on the latest Kindles will look exactly as it would on a previous-gen model" [12].
A household or office buyer can sort each reader on two questions: whether the lock-screen ads bother them, and whether they need more than 16GB. If the ads are tolerable and 16GB is enough, the $150 plastic Kindle covers it [1]. Someone who dislikes the ads but fits in 16GB is paying the $40 mostly to remove them, and gets the metal and storage with it [1]. Where the storage is needed, the aluminum model is the purchase anyway, and the ads go with the upgrade [1].
Children are a separate case. At PCMag's prices, the $179.99 Kindle Kids costs $30 more than the $149.99 base model [5][15]. It includes a year of Kids+, which PCMag says usually costs $69.99, and a two-year replacement warranty [14].
What to watch
- An ad-removal fee on Amazon's store page for the plastic Kindle and Paperwhite would separate the ads from the aluminum upgrade.
- PCMag's lab tests of the new screens, set against Amazon's claim of 30 percent faster page turns.
- Further Kindle price moves if the memory costs Keith described keep rising.