Review: The 2011 $79 Kindle with ads and buttons | Hacker News Reader

Review: The 2011 $79 Kindle with ads and buttons

marco.org

87 pointsrevorad96 comments

The lock screen shows a giant ad whenever the Kindle is off. Previous Kindles show tasteful pictures of classic authors when they’re off.

This comment says more about how Marco sees technology than anything else. I can understand complaints about the page buttons, the cheap cable, and no power adapter.

But tasteful pictures of classic authors? You're telling me that a creepy-looking picture of Emily Dickinson is a large improvement over an AT&T ad? Look at these screen savers and tell me any of them is worth paying an extra $50:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LasvphqtfV0

I agree with the sentiment: ads can be disgusting. I just don't understand how someone could complain when ads mean savings get passed on. Ads make the Kindle more affordable and take us a step closer to a future where everyone can afford technology. That's a trade-off I'm willing to make.

I think the real question is: why is putting ads on our reading devices worth $50 to advertisers? We can be proud and say that such ads have no effect on our behavior, but statistics say otherwise.

Certainly I see a lifestyle difference between friends who watch TV and those who don't, and I spend and desire much less now that I only occasionally watch movies on Netflix.

So it's a Catch-22: you can save money on this purchase, but only by ultimately spending more on things you will later be convinced that you need.

> why is putting ads on our reading devices worth $50 to advertisers? We can be proud and say that such ads have no effect on our behavior, but statistics say otherwise.

This does not actually have to be true. Think about Windows Home vs Professional; it actually takes Microsoft much more work to offer both rather than offer just Professional. The experience is strictly worse for the user, and Microsoft makes less per sale on Home.

So why do they even have a Home edition? It's because of market segmentation and pricing strategies. If it costs $70 marginal cost to manufacture a kindle, you will make some amount of money from each person that pays $79.

What if $9 * # of potential purchases at that price point is less than the flat R&D costs? Then you can't make money at that price point. Now imagine all the kindles cost $100; a lot less people might buy it at $100 than would at $79. It's actually often in the best interest of the company if they could get half the people to pay $100, and anyone who would refuse to pay that to still buy it at $79.

The only way to make that happen is to have to make some sort of differentiating factor that is minor enough so price sensitive people will still buy it, but that people who have the extra money will still pay the higher price. Windows professional is the same as basic for the vast majority of people, yet people still buy professional because to the people who are less price sensitive, it's worth it to not even hypothetically be missing features.

In that way, they could easily be making $0 from the ads, or even negative income by showing the ads and still have it be a good idea to make a version with ads that costs less than the version without ads. It sometimes makes sense for a company to spend more money making a deliberately inferior version.

That's an interesting point, and changes how I look at the new kindles. I had assumed the marginal cost was closer to the ad-free version, and the ads subsidize the price for those who can't afford that. But if the marginal cost is less than $79 it could just be an elaborate price discrimination strategy. Fascinating!

I guess the real question, then, is what's the marginal cost of a Kindle? I haven't seen any tear downs of the new version indicating the component prices.

Call me cynical, but I think the only reason the more expensive option is available is so that most people will accept ads on the cheaper version. If they actually allowed me to put my own images onto the screensaver I might actually go for the more expensive option but as it is I'm bored with the screensavers on my current kindle and wouldn't mind nice looking ads that were constantly changing.

It almost certainly voids your warranty, but you can actually root kindle3s or under pretty easily and install a program/mod that lets you change those backgrounds.

Sure, you're absolutely right. Regardless, both versions exist, and I don't care for creepy pictures of Jules Verne so I'm going for the ads!

I don't think you can compare a physical product with software like this. The incremental cost of goods of MS Home is a couple dollars; the incremental CoGs for the kindle may be more than the $79 price. At the very least, a segmentation needs to cause CoGs to be covered (note that those CoGs might be covered by the more expensive kindle). Of course, engineering time needs to be taken into account to develop the segmented products.

I don't think the $30 will be earned in ads, but the strategic value of a kindle or two in every house is big.

Of course you can. It's the same economics whether the incremental costs are $2 or $80. You could make a comparison between the Kindle and the Camry the same way. Both exploit price elasticity by segmenting and selling nearly the same product at very different price points. It's irrelevant that the Camry's CoG is probably 200 times that of the Kindle.

What's different about the Kindle vs Windows is not the CoGs. What's different is the indirect pricing. Amazon is willing to sell the Kindle for cost because they know they'll make their money in sales of books. Microsoft won't really make any extra money just because you buy Windows. (Windows 8 with the App Store will probably change that somewhat.) On the other hand, Microsoft sells Windows to OEMs very cheap, because there's value in having such huge market share.

Exactly - they are essentially selling a "I'm a cheapskate" version and a "I can afford to pay more" version.

Agreed. No TV means no restaurant commercials, so I've been eating at home more often. On the other hand, I bought a reading light after seeing a Kindle ad for it. The Kindle has also saved $15 on Amazon purchases I would've made anyway, though.

I dunno, it really depends on your taste for consumption.

YMMV, but I actually love the screen savers on the Kindle. Worth $50? Dunno. But it's nice to have at least one part of our lives not be infested by ads.

I haven't seen the ads but agree with Marco regarding the pictures of authors. They are beautiful.

I turn my Kindle on and off again whenever the Emily Dickinson picture comes up. She looks dead.

That picture is what tilted the scale for me to get the $79 version. I don't have to look at that creepy face staring back at me, while saving thirty bucks.

Heh I actually don't mind that picture and I like the author photos.

I am still on a kindle 2 and if I were going to upgrade it would be to the keyboard 3g without ads but for now as long as my kindle 2 isn't broken and keeps that amazing battery life with 3g off I don't see any reason to upgrade just yet. Now if they cut the price of the kindle keyboard 3g with no ads in half for prime subscribers however I would buy it in an instant.

I don't mind the ads, as they get out of the way when I read.

Targetted ads can be very useful, for example, when I buy a hotrod magazine I buy it for the ads. However, the current Kindle ads are not targetted at all, none of them seem to have any relationship to things I do buy on Amazon.

Many people complain when the ads are targetted. Google get a lot of flak about that.

Yeah to be honest, I never understood that. Google's serving things that will hopefully be more relevant to your interests and you might enjoy. Personally, I think it beats all the other ads about tips on how to whiten my teeth or lose 10 pounds.

I think the (anticipated) trouble with targeted ads is that they compete for your attention with the content that you were trying to view in the first place. Imagine you sit down to read a book and are first hit with an ad which, at that moment, actually seems more compelling than the book, because unlike the book, it has been perfectly refined by analyzing your actual behavior to attract your attention.

It depends what you were browsing when it picked up your interests and who is watching when it shows the ads!

A UK ISP got into trouble when it was (illegally) tracking all your web browsing and replacing each site's ads with it's own ads based on your browsing history. When it replaced the ads for a childrens charity on a national fundraising event with some targeted at 'gentlemen's special interest' sites there was something of an outcry

I don't understand why, at least on the non-ad banner versions, why Amazon doesn't allow people to load their own images for use as screensavers. B&N allows this with the Nook and I think that it's pretty cool.

Probably because they don't see it necessary. Amazon seems to see any actions that aren't directly related to:

- Buy book

- Read book

as a waste of space and another thing that could go wrong.

Yeah, there are quite a few options that seem like they should be native, but I had to hack the device to get. Custom screen savers is one. Another is force left-justify on everything.

I didn't realize the Kindle could be hacked to do that. Good to know.

There are entire forums and blogs dedicated to it: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=128704

Is the quality good enough? It seems like 9 out of 10 people make their screensaver their SO or kids. If the average use case is going to have people going "ugh, this screen is terrible", it's probably not a good idea.

The guy who I know who has a Nook STR uses black and white comic art for his screen savers. They look pretty cool.

Oh yeah, I've definitely seen people who have nice screensavers. My point was that people who naively put photos on without preprocessing, reducing color depth, etc, would probably be disappointed.

I would pay a few dollars extra for this feature on my Kindle 3. Or at least for an update to add some new images to the cycle.

Hm, I don’t know, Marco seems to agree with you, doesn’t he?

Ads make the Kindle look cheap but he doesn’t actually seem to think that’s a problem. The Kindle is cheap and he likes it that way.

I'm wondering how anyone could strongly prefer author portraits over ads when the portraits look as creepy as they do.

My point really should've been: between creepy pictures and bland ads, I'll take the ads--especially if I can effectively get a few books for free.

For what it's worth, I have the non-ads current generation Kindle and the screensavers are not famous authors anymore, but instead macro shots of writing instruments. Pencils, quills, typewriter heads, etc.

For the record: it's a $30, not $50, price difference.

On this lowest end model, it's $30. On the Kindle Touch, it's $40. On the Kindle Keyboard 3G, it's $50. Kinda strange, since you would think the value of the ads would be constant.

Maybe advertisers figure you don't have much money if you can only afford $79.

It's too bad that the Kindle is getting so much attention (even if some is negative, like this piece), when there are many other better options. I had a Kindle 3 until I bought a Nook Simple Touch, and the NST blows the K3 out of the water in every respect: build quality, software interface, reading experience and options. The only downside might be the in-store selection, but for geeks like us (and increasingly regular folks, thanks to Calibre) it's a simple matter to break Amazon's DRM and convert to Epub.

B&N has got to step up their game, because if sub-par products like the $79 Kindle keep stealing the limelight, they're never going to get anywhere.

The Kindle has one feature that the Nook does not have: Electronic delivery of personal documents. You can't email a word doc or PDF to myname@bn.com and have it converted and delivered to your device. You have to save it from a computer, convert it, plug in the Nook, and copy the file over.

For book readers that might not matter. But it can be pretty attractive if you go beyond reading books by using something like Instapaper to "bookmark" articles throughout the day, then have them all automatically on the Kindle.

This can be the feature that makes a huge difference once you start to use it.

I also have Instapaper articles delivered to my Kindle. It's pretty awesome but it isn't a hard to implement feature - why don't they implement it?

Yeah. Instapaper and emailing files, along with already having a large amount of Kindle purchases, are the reasons I've stuck with Kindle.

This was the dealbreaker for me. I hate plugging devices in and use Instapaper a lot, so I chose the Kindle even though the Simple Touch looked nicer.

I wish the Kindle (and ipad) could browse the shared file directories on my LAN. This is a glaring and inexplicable deficiency.

You can browse website and download files there. So you could set up a simple web server on your machine (since this is HN I going to assume this is easy for you!) and download files there.

It's great that you can browse Project Gutenberg on the device and download the Kindle formatted .mobi files directly and import them. It's like a Free (as in Public Domain) book shop!

Ha, yeah, I'd assume Walter Bright would be able to do that... :-)

But he shouldn't have to! We want him spending less time fiddling around with a home network and more time working on cool things like D.

The best thing that I think B&N has going for it is their seemingly ongoing commitment to quality. I bought the original Nook shortly after its release and only recently decided to grab the NST to replace it (due almost entirely to simple gadget-envy). The Nook that I retired was a significantly better product than the Nook I originally bought. B&N continued to release relevant software updates for their original Nook for years. These weren't just bugfixes, but also major performance improvements, design improvements, and entirely new features. Basically, the Nook was, for me, the opposite of a disposable product because it kept getting better. That definitely built some brand-loyalty for me.

Read to the end. This is a very positive review of the new Kindle.

Keep in mind this isn't a review of the competition for the NST, which is the Kindle Touch. This is a review of the non-touch Kindle, which B&N has no competition for, espeically at a price that is $60 less.

Well, B&N is selling their remaining 1st edition Nook's at $89.

I want to literally get my hands on a Kindle and feel it (I've seen lots of them but never held one) to see if really has worse build quality than the flimsy NST. (I own an old but sturdy Sony PRS-505; other than wishing it were as fast as the recent Kindles or the NST, I have no complaints about it.)

the NST blows the K3 out of the water in every respect

No wireless, less space than a Nomad.

It does have Wifi, but not 3G (which I personally I think is overkill for a reading device). You can plug SD cards into it to extend the space, and with books weighing in at a few hundred KB, for the vast majority of people space isn't an issue.

My quote is from the Slashdot review of the announcement of the iPod (http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ip...). It's an example of where (usually) geeks fall into the trap of enumerating the raw engineering facts and think those raw engineering facts are what will decide the matter.

In truth, it's more than feature checklists. Marketing and social factors can play a large part in the success of a large product.

Not to get too nitpicky here, but bookmarking twitter.com/longreads and reading excellent long-form articles on the go is an excellent Kindle use case. This was another selling point for me over the NST.

Poe's Law: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257...

I got one, this is my first Kindle.

I am incredibly impressed than they produced something like this proced at $79 dollars. Instant delivery of thousands of book, supposed 2 months of battery life, extremely light, fits in my pocket. This is star-trek technology.

And it costs $79.

Minor correction: the base Kindle only advertises 1 month of battery life. Although, for most practical purposes, the difference between 1 month and 2 months is orders of magnitude less important than the difference between 1 week and 1 month.

The ad-to-purchase flow is the killer feature of this device.

(1) These are pre-loaded with your Amazon.com account (the one you bought it with). You don't have to sign in to it, it already knows who you are.

(2) The first ad I saw was a "local deal" for a massage near where I live (for Ballard, in Seattle). This is minutes after first turning on the Kindle. No data entry. I was curious what the user experience was so I opened the ad. There was a Buy button for the massage ($26 for a 20 minute massage). I'm working on an order path / checkout flow for work right now so I was curious to see how they did it on the Kindle. I clicked the Buy button (again, I have yet to do any keyboard data entry on the device) and... I had bought. "Thanks for your purchase" read the screen and my iPhone beeped with the confirmation email.

The Kindle comes pre-loaded with your Amazon account and everything is set up for one-click purchasing.

Genius.

(I debated forward the email to my wife, but just cancelled the order instead).

"but you’ll regret purchasing an alternative the first time a book isn’t available there but is available for Kindle, which happens a lot."

This has never happened to me. Everything I've encountered that's not available on Kobo is also not available on Kindle. Is this because I don't live in the US?

Probably. Sadly, the book, music, and movies industries don't seem to be keeping up with the changes globalization have brought.

Not true.

Globalization works well for the media (books, music, movie) industry. They can stratify and adjust rates to the destination country. Doing so, they can maximise profits for each area.

Doing so also requires that users do not share amongst other areas, so 'zone controls' along with ill-suited laws are passed.

Who globalisation does not work well for when concerning media is the rest of us. With exception of piracy, we are prevented from easily using globalisation in our advantage.

Piracy is the great equaliser. It alone has scared media companies from releasing on a 2-3 year theater-to-public to as little as 1 month turnaround. And it is the ideal method to use to play your media format on any system (unlike restricted legit formats).

The big draw for me with the Kindle that doesn't seem to be available on its competitors is wireless document delivery - I used this with Instapaper, and now with Readability. Thanks to it, I never need to worry about plugging my Kindle into my PC to add articles I want to read. There's also some interesting content in the curated "Kindle Singles" section, cheap short stories, novellas, etc.

Did you switch from Instapaper to Readability? If so, why? Did you want to support authors directly?

Honestly, I switched because I liked the interface and the mobile web app more than I liked Instapaper's site and app. Readability's "readable view" is soooo much nicer than Instapaper's. Supporting authors is a nice bonus, though.

This isn't a problem for me since there is a Calibre plugin that converts azw to epub. I just buy from wherever is cheapest, unless a DRM-free version is available for a few dollars more (Just because I can strip the DRM doesn't mean I don't want to vote with my dollars).

I bought the $79 Kindle the first day it was available. It's my first Kindle.

I have an iPad, and I never felt like the Kindles were worth the money for the marginal additional benefit over an iPad. But for $79, who cares. I use it before bed and to carry around when I'd be worried about the iPad

The iPad is terrible for reading books.

I was on a plane and got a headache while reading on the iPad - the screen glare is unbearable - I could see the reflection of the above light-source and my ugly face. And the device itself is a lot heavier than a Kindle, so you also get tired from holding it.

After 2 hours of struggling I took out my netbook, which at least can sit in my lap.

Terrible for some people. I have no problem at all reading long texts on the iPad. It’s an ok compromise for me.

I think you'll be really happy with the Kindle the first time you try to read on it outside in sunlight or with glare on the screen.

I really hate the idea of buying semi-disposable items, particularly electronics. It just becomes one more item in the landfill, one more thing to replace with a newly manufactured version. We're seeing that with computers and it's becoming a real problem. It isn't that I don't love new things but part of the reason that new things are so nice is because the things we're manufacturing are not designed to last. If only there was more money in environmentalism. Then maybe some smart hackernewsers would produce solutions.

>I really hate the idea of buying semi-disposable items, particularly electronics.

There's no reason for a Kindle to be "semi-disposable". There isn't anything so cheap that it's going to wear out or break in a short period of time, as long as you take care of it.

The review explicitly stated that the low end kindle was worth it because you could just buy another when it breaks.

Yes, it does, but there's no reason this one is more likely to break than the others. The low end kindle may not last if you mistreat it, but that's true for just about anything.

I concur with his disappointment regarding the buttons. It's incredibly awkward to use with one hand, especially when lying down, which is a major design flaw IMO.

This is a complaint I've been hearing from the majority of in real life people that own a Kindle3. Interestingly enough, I do own a Kindle3 and have used the previous versions and I like the next/prev page buttons on the Kindle3 better. I find that they're harder to press by accident, and although at first I found them awkward to use in the beginning, after going through half of the A Song of Ice and Fire saga I find them perfect for the way I hold my Kindle. I'm a big bookworm though (I spend from 8 to 16 hours a day programming, ie. looking at a screen... therefore I'm not really interested in watching TV and use books as my daily escape from reality mechanism) and going through three of those books, which by the way are humongous compared to "regular" books, took me about two weeks at about four hours of usage a day. The point being that I believe that after you have been using a Kindle for 60+ hours, I think that this type of buttons kind of grow on you.

The statistician in me kind of want's to know what are the usage statistics for people that dislike the buttons and people that love them, though that could also be because I want confirmation that I'm not just a dude with a weird hand anatomy! In any case, how long have you been using your Kindle and what are your usage patterns?

PD: I can't believe I'm so damn interested in freaking usage statistics on Kindle buttons...

We geeks typically place too much importance on the fidelity of the experience: on the idea that the kindle itself feels cheap, or the music from the (standard) iPhone headphones is poor quality. Most people just don't care - they want to listen to the same music as their friends, or get on with reading lots and lots of books. The fidelity of the experience is totally unimportant in 90% of cases.

>"Honestly, once I got into what I was reading, I forgot about the cheap, crappy page-turn buttons and the tacky ads on the sleep screen. Even the distorted unblinked text isn’t very noticeable when you’re engrossed in a book."

A hardware implementation of the used paperback principle.

As I've said before, ebooks are the killer slate application

I'm not surprised by the ghosting problems as I've read about this on Nook related forums as well. Maybe both companies should consider allowing people to alter how often the unit refreshes (although I believe this can be altered on the Nook STR if the unit has been rooted).

Kindle Firmware v4.0.1 gives you this.

I have switched from the 3G+WiFi Kindle 3/Kindle Keyboard to the new $79 Kindle and am pretty happy with it. Gets rid of the stuff I didn't use (Audio playback, speakers, keyboard) to make a device even smaller. 3G is something I used so rarely I don't think I'll miss it.

I decided to order the ad-supported model because I knew I could just pay Amazon $30 to turn them off if they bothered me. But it turns out I'm fine with them. They're not egregious and I only see them for the couple seconds it takes me to wake the Kindle and select a book.

The ghosting is something I have noticed but it's something that is just as easy to ignore as the full-flash-every-turn issue on the prior models.

Does anyone know the mechanics of how the ads are pushed to the Kindle? Does Amazon observe user behavior and content of the ad supported Kindles in ways they didn't with the Kindle 3?

Your Kindle is tied to your Amazon account so the ads are based on your Amazon browsing and purchasing.

This is kind of disappointing. I broke the screen on my Kindle 3 the other day, but wasn't too worried because I was planning on getting either this Kindle or the Touch anyways. I was thinking of buying the $79 Kindle today, since I didn't want to stop reading on the go for a month (I really don't like LCD screens) while waiting for the Touch to come out, but now I'm definitely rethinking it, especially due to the ghosting - sounds like it would get very annoying.

The Kindle 4.0.1 software update ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_l... ) lets you control this.

Oh, awesome! Definitely takes away one of my major worries about the new Kindle.

I've read two books so far on the ad-free version of this Kindle, and I've seen the degraded quality when I study the page quality, but never while actually reading.

Doesn't every iPod or iPhone charger since they ditched firewire for USB work with the kindle if you swap the usb leads? I'd have thought Marco's house would be overflowing with such USB power adaptors. The cable even seems color-matched for this.

Sad to see that the two most important buttons on the device haven't been improved. I'm glad I still have a working Kindle 2!

I think this is one of those times where what you've used first is what you like best. My first Kindle was a version 3 and thought the buttons were weird when I handled a relative's version 2 last Christmas.

Good point!

$79 in the US. £89 (~$140) in the UK. That's far a far bigger markup than can be explained by import tax / VAT. Anyone know why we have to pay almost double?

You can't get the ad-supported version outside the US, so that's an automatic $30 markup.

From the article:

  The Kindle 1 was $400. This one’s $79 with ads.

  Knowing that this new Kindle costs less than the cover for my Kindle 2 is freeing: 
  I can just carry it around uncased and unprotected in a (large) pocket, use it anywhere, and not worry about damaging an expensive electronic item, because it’s not.

---

Astonishing how far prices and production have come down since the first Kindle, which still seems relatively new.

Also, he paid $70+ for a Kindle case? I'm planning to buy a Kindle Touch and, being someone who carries his iPad and Macbook Air because, what the hell, they both fit easily in my DSLR camera bag, I'm going to really like carrying $400 less in electronics (I almost never use my ipad if I have a laptop with me, out of the home). But even if the Kindle Touch cost more, I wouldn't pay $70+ for a case...I don't think I've ever spent that much on a laptop or ipad case (I currently carry my Air in a padded Fedex envelope).

The ones with back-light are really helpful if you want to read in low-light. Generally those are the ones that cost more. If you do such things than they become quite useful. I own one and I use it all the time. It's way better than turning on the light in the bedroom and bother my girlfriend. Now she doesn't realize that I don't fall asleep until 3-4 AM. :)

I think this is the case he had for the Kindle 2, which does look pretty sweet, and that Kindle was a $300 product so a pricier case makes sense: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0026IBJNQ/

And even now, the official lighted leather Kindle 3 case is $60.

I hope the Kindle Fire is better than this :(

$80 Ad-subsidized e-book reader feels cheep, has ads.

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