Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Amazon's New Kindle Is Only $80, Comes In White, and With More Storage

Posted by msmash on from the affinity-for-ereaders dept.

Found the $290 Kindle Oasis too expensive? Amazon has a new, familiar e-reader for you. On Wednesday, the e-commerce giant announced a new, more-affordable Kindle that is pretty much identical to the Kindle Paperwhite, but costs only $80. It comes in white as well as black, and has 512MB storage space (the Kindle Paperwhite sport a 256MB internal storage chip). From an Ars Technica report:In addition to the extra memory, the $80 Kindle will have a slightly thinner, lighter, and more rounded design than its predecessors. It will have a touchscreen display as well, but it won't be the 300 PPI screen that the $120 Kindle Paperwhite has (it will sport a 167 PPI display instead). Some reports also suggest that the new Kindle will come with Bluetooth support so blind readers can hook up a pair of wireless headphones to listen to books, along with a note-sending feature that will let you send yourself messages and highlights, which can be exported as PDFs or spreadsheets.

2 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. Calbre is Awesome by CrashNBrn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I was extremely surprised and impressed with Calibre. I tried at least a half-dozen different applications to just be able to "view epub's" on a PC.
    Microsoft's Store was useless. Over half of the apps listed weren't even epub readers. You can't install even or download a "windows store" app without activating a Microsoft Account.
    The included "pdf" viewer can't read epubs.
    Every single other native-windows (non-Windows Store) app that I installed required an account to be setup with them - just to manage LOCAL files.

    Then finally, ok lets try Calibre. It just works.

    Then... I realize (after "Inspecting") epub|mobi is freaking just HTML.

    Even FF requires a 1MB extension add-on to view epubs. W-T-F.

  2. Re:No thanks. by CRCulver · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'll read PDFs and use audiobooks on devices that won't delete my library whenever they want

    I have owned a Kindle now for three years (upgraded to the Paperwhite last year) and have never bought an ebook -- everything that I read comes from pirated ebook communities or Project Gutenburg. Since the moment I took the Kindle out of the box, it has been in airplane mode, so it doesn't connect to anything outside. Kindles have been problematic if you use them to read content purchased from Amazon, but if you simply don't do that, they are great and reliable e-readers.