Amazon to sell ad-supported Kindle for $114

Amazon on Monday announced that it will offer a Kindle with advertising. The hardware  remains the same, but the price has dropped to $114.

The Kindle with ads -- which Amazon is calling Kindle with Special Offers" -- is $25 off the current retail price. Available now for pre-orders, it will ship May 3.

The Kindle with Special Offers advertisements will appear as full-screen screensavers and as an option on the home screen -- as Amazon puts it in the release, "To make sure customers don't miss any of the offers, a full list of active offers will be available from the menu of Kindle with Special Offers at any time."

Offers that have been announced include six audiobooks for $6 from Audible and a number of Amazon discounts with a purchase, particularly a purchase with the Amazon.com Reward Visa Card (from Chase).

Other companies in the first round of screensaver advertisements are Visa, Buick and Olay (Procter & Gamble).

Amazon is launching "AdMash," a Kindle app and website where customers can choose the display advertisements that will become Kindle-sponsored screensavers. The app is free -- which one might expect, considering it's asking customers to voluntarily act as a focus group for advertisers.

The bigger problem with this is that it just doesn't look that great. While text displayswell on the Kindle's low-glare, e-ink display, images don't fare so well. The Kindle is still in grayscale -- and on  screen, we've grown accustomed to seeing our photographs in full color.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Amazon's "Kindle with Special Offers." Credit: Amazon

Comments

[Kevin]

Personally, if I even had any interest at all in owning a Kindle I'd paid the lousy $25 more just to NOT get the ads.

[Chaz]

No kidding.

"To make sure customers don't miss any of the offers, a full list of active offers will be available from the menu of Kindle with Special Offers at any time."

"Offers". By all means let's not say "ads". These are "offers"! Yeah, that's it. Even better, though, they should have made it "opportunities".