For 15 years, the bottom rung of the Kindle range has come with an unspoken deal: you let Amazon turn your lock screen into a tiny billboard, and in return you get a fairly cheap e-reader. Since Amazon’s August price rise, which we’ve already argued has made Kindles officially too expensive, only the first half of that deal still looks good.
The basic Kindle with ads now costs $149.99, the same as a NOOK GlowLight 4 that never shows you one. That doesn’t make the ad-supported Kindle a bad buy, but it does narrow down who it’s actually for.
The ad discount has shrunk
But the price it’s attached to hasn’t
Amazon first launched the Kindle with Special Offers in April 2011, priced at $114, or $25 less than the same Kindle without the sponsored screensavers. Jeff Bezos pitched it at the time as a way to put a Kindle within reach of anyone who wanted one, and for a long time, that’s basically what it did.
Fast forward to Aug. 21 of this year, when Amazon raised prices across its hardware. Suddenly, the 16GB Kindle jumped from $109.99 to $149.99, reportedly due to widespread rising memory and storage costs, and the ad-free model now sits at $169.99.
So the gap between the two versions is $20, which is less than it was in 2011 before you even account for inflation, and a much smaller slice of a much larger bill.
What you’re actually giving up
It’s less than you might think
It’s sometimes tempting to characterize Kindle ads as intrusive, but they’re actually fairly contained, popping up on the lock screen or as a banner on the home screen, but never inside a book, and mostly just to promote other Kindle titles. Amazon also added settings last year to filter inappropriate lock screen ads (so no more surprise romance covers on the bus) and to personalize the rest based on what the user tends to browse and buy.
We’ve argued before that you should stop buying new Kindles until your old one gives out, noting that the ads are easy enough to swipe past on the way to your chosen book. I’d broadly agree, because nobody is actually being forced to sit through a long advert in any of these cases.
You can only set your book cover as the lock screen on ad-free Kindles, though, so an ad-supported model will instead serve you a promotion instead of what you’re really there for, and you’ll have to swipe again to get back to your page. For some readers, that’s not a big deal, but for others, it chips away at the calm, single-purpose appeal of a dedicated e-reader every time they pick it up.
The rivals have caught up on everything else
Yet none of them show you ads
Amazon is the only major e-reader company that sells two versions of the same device, one with ads and one without, and for years it was a clever way to commandeer the bottom of the market. With the new prices, it’s suddenly sharing that spot with a lot of other brands.
The NOOK GlowLight 4 is $149.99 at Barnes & Noble, matching the ad-supported Kindle right down to the cent, and it comes with 32GB of storage and physical page-turn buttons, neither of which the basic Kindle offers. Barnes & Noble Premium members also get 10% off NOOK devices, which is enough to put it below the Kindle outright.
Then there’s the Kobo Clara BW, which lists at $159.99 – $10 more than the Kindle with ads but $10 less than the Kindle without them, and it’s waterproof, borrows library books directly from the device through OverDrive, and opens EPUB files natively instead of routing them through Send to Kindle.
Kobo isn’t immune to rising costs, of course, having raised its own prices by $10 to $30 earlier this year. Still, the Clara BW undercuts the ad-free Kindle, and that’s a fairer comparison when neither Kobo nor Barnes & Noble asks you to look at ads in the first place.
Where the ad-supported Kindle still makes sense
But only if you were buying one anyway
None of this means the ad tier isn’t worth it anymore, and one detail keeps it firmly in play. You aren’t locked in, and if you buy the Kindle with ads and decide you can’t stand them, Amazon lets you remove them later for a one-time fee. In the US, that fee is currently $20 (we’ve covered the process in our article on easy ways to upgrade a new Kindle). So, choosing ads up front costs you nothing you can’t get back.
That makes the decision pretty simple if you already have years of built-up Kindle purchases or a Kindle Unlimited addiction, since books bought from Amazon’s store won’t open on a Kobo or NOOK. If that sounds like you, I’d buy the ad-supported model, live with it for a few weeks, and only pay the $20 if the lock screen starts to grate on you.
I’d think twice, though, if you’re new to e-reading, because without a library tying you to Amazon, the ad-supported Kindle just isn’t the default cheap option anymore. If price is the deciding factor, check what Kobo and Barnes & Noble are charging that week before hitting the buy button on Amazon.
The genuinely cheapest way into Kindle reading is still the free app on the phone already in your pocket, of course, but that’s a different argument and not one many E Ink fans want to hear. And if Amazon’s wider ecosystem gives you pause, reasons not to buy another Kindle go well beyond the lock screen.
