I’d been wanting to read at night, and with Amazon Black Friday going on, I decided to buy a Kindle.
The thing is, there are about four different Kindle variants to choose from.
I used to have a Kindle Paperwhite from several years back, and the screen was so easy on the eyes even after long stretches that I was leaning toward that one again. But I saw good reviews of the basic Kindle too, and since I was just going to use it hard and only read at night, I figured the cheaper one would do — so I went with the plain Kindle.
For Black Friday it was marked down from about 9,000 yen to about 5,000 yen.
On top of that, buying a Kindle device gets you three months of Kindle Unlimited (normally 980 yen/month) for free, so effectively I picked up the device for around 2,000 yen.
What a deal!!!!
Here’s the actual Kindle.
The first thing I thought when the box arrived was how incredibly thin it is.
The contents are simple: a charging cable, the device itself, and a manual.
The cable is micro-USB, which is a bit inconvenient now that USB-C is everywhere, but since you only need to charge about once a week, it’s really not a drawback.
Unlike the Kindle Paperwhite, the screen uses a front light and is lower resolution on paper, but that’s only something you notice in a side-by-side comparison — for actually reading books, the image quality is more than sufficient.
Reflections are also well controlled, and reading at night doesn’t tire my eyes at all. My first impression was that it was better than I expected.
The thing I hated most about the old Kindle Paperwhite was how sluggish it was — searching for books or turning pages was genuinely stressful. This Kindle is noticeably faster, roughly like using a slightly older smartphone.
Given the price difference, whether the other models are worth paying more than twice as much for probably depends on the person, but the basic Kindle offers excellent value and works fine as an everyday device.
And because it was cheap, I can use it as hard as I like — I feel like I made a really good purchase.
You should all kattemitekudasai.