So you bought a $79 Kindle and you’re suffering pangs of regret. You wish you could be looking at beautiful faux woodcut art on the screen saver, and you wish you hadn’t sacrificed those bottom few lines of the home screen menu. Sure, you never see these ads while reading books, which is about 99% of the time you spend using the device, but that 1% may be small but is still pretty jarring. Ah well, what can you do?
Used to be that the answer to that question was nothing. Nothing at all, short of buying a different Kindle. Not so anymore. Amazon’s Manage Your Kindle screen apparently now allows you to turn off the advertising for $30, or the same price difference you saved in getting the Special Offers Kindle in the first place.
The question has come up as to whether Amazon will ever allow the reverse—take a regular Kindle and offer $30 (perhaps in store credit) to enable ads. So far there’s no indication that that’s in the works.
This ability to unsubscribe from Special Offers is only available for the latest generation of Kindle owners; sorry, those of you with ad-supported Kindle 3 units!
Have you purchased a Kindle with Special Offers? Do the ads bother you? Is this a tempting offer? Let us know in the comments!
(via Engadget, MobileRead & Amazon.)
I may be in the vast minority here, yet the ads on my $79 Kindle don’t bother me one bit – as a business owner, I completely understand the value of advertising and the need for companies to get their product information “to the masses”. Think of it this way: If the public, as a whole, decided to completely “turn off” a company’s ability to advertise to them, then that company would no longer have any long-term interest in selling their products because they know that, once their existing consumer base has dissipated, they would not be able to bring in new customers because people do not want to see their ads. Once that scenario eventually occurs, it will no longer be profitable for that company to sell their products, therefore they’ll stop selling those products. If the “products no longer profitable” trend continues too long, that company will invariably go out of business because they can no longer compete in their market-space. Like it or not, this is how any for-profit business works in a Capitalist society.
People may not realize this, yet there happens to be an app, on Amazon.com, that can be downloaded onto an ad-supported Kindle which will allow the Kindle owner to vote on which ads he/she wants to see. I suggest people give that app a try before shelling out an additional $30 in a “knee-jerk” reaction to rid themselves of what are, in the end, extremely unobtrusive advertisements.
Just my 2 cents.
This is an incredibly smooth move on Amazon’s part. I didn’t see this coming, but what a wonderful idea. There’s bound to be people taking advantage of this immediately.
I didn’t buy a KSO (Kindle Special Offers) model specifically because I knew it would irritate me to have ads looking at me every time I switch the device off or looked at the Home screen.
There are others who will likely find that this becomes the case over time. Amazon lets them do that and for no extra cost (comparatively to a standard Kindle)?
Win.
One of the resaons I like it quite a bit is that it essentially allows you to pay in chunks. If $79 sounds better to you right now than $109 does, pay the $79 now and then in a few weeks, a month, whenever, give them the other $30 and ditch the ads.