"Nothing I'd buy a new one for." Exactly my thought. I'll continue to use (and love) my Kindle Keyboard everyday.

This makes me worry about Amazon's future in the ereader space. The Touch is gone, replaced with this for $139 sans offers. The capable Kobo Touch and Nook Touch are $99.

$40 for a light and whiter background? I'll continue to use my $4.50 clip-on light, thanks.

Kindles aren't at the head of the price versus performance curve anymore.

They're still at the head of the price curve if you look at the price that matters: $69. you don't really need a touch screen, a glow light, and the ads are not a big deal. Kindle is still the cheapest real player in the e-reader market.

I probably won't be upgrading from my 3rd-gen kindle either, but somehow i doubt amazon cares. I'm sure they make more off of book purchases from 3-year-old kindles than they do from the sale of new hardware. They want to sell kindles to as many people as they can, but once you've got a kindle all they need you to do is keep buying content.

The price of the Kobo goes down by $20 too if you throw in ads.

Also, how do you search for words or phrases without a keyboard or touchpad? I find that a very handy ereader feature. Well worth $10.

Oh remember the days of paper books and indexes...

I rarely do searches on my Kindle 4, and when I do there's a not-as-cumbersome-as-you'd-think-but-pretty-cumbersome-anyway keyboard that you can use. In exchange, I get a smaller, lighter Kindle that's easier to pack around.

That said, the physical page-turn buttons are the best part. Without those, I'd never use the thing.

Maybe it's just me, but there are circumstances when I prefer a good index to a text search. If a term is informally introduced and used a couple of times in the few pages before it's defined, for example, I usually want the formal definition, and I can just remember that that's the second index entry rather than the first rather than Ctrl-G-ing my way through a bunch of uses.

(I do passionately hate bad indexes, though.)

$69 only in US, others still have to pay the full $89 price.

$69 is the Ad supported one (which is US only). $89 is the ad free one I believe

Yup. I have a 2nd gen Kindle, but I purchase material regularly. They could care less whether I buy the latest model.

Maybe the point is Amazon doesn't want people to upgrade?

They make the money on content sales, as long as you keep buying books they are happier you don't purchase a new loss leader device.

Jeff Bezos stated this explicitly during the presentation - Amazon wants to make money when you use the device, not when you buy it. So they sell the Kindles at a very aggressive price in order to get you into the Amazon ecosystem. If you're already there, they're not going to make much, if anything, if you upgrade.

Which is why it's odd that they seem to abandon their older devices the moment new hardware is released. You can't report passages with errors in them on the KK for instance, because that feature only exists on the Kindle4 devices.

It's possible that the new software couldn't be ported to the older hardware of course, and keeping multiple lines of software current takes more developer resources, but if Amazon doesn't want people to upgrade, then turning their hardware into abandonware seems like it's a counterproductive move.

Amazon makes a virtue internally of doing everything 'on a shoestring' supposedly, this is probably just an external reflection of that I guess.

Yeah, this is a good point. It's long seemed to me the incentive for Android manufacturers is not to provide retroactive upgrades (and only helpful for Apple insofar as it is a competitive selling point).

Amazon seems the opposite; good software updates would make your old device feel new (just optimize speed and bugfixes, if nothing else). That would prevent people from upgrading to such "cheap" new models.

On the other hand maybe they expect to sell an order of magnitude more devices each generation. Also, depending whether the old devices end up in desk drawers or new users' hands it might all work out.

Further investigation reveals that Amazon did release a firmware update to the KK in June: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_n...

They've still pretty much abandoned the K2 & DX users, but perhaps the userbase for those is so small it isn't worth supporting them: it would probably be cheaper to just send them all new Kindles, but I doubt Amazon will do that...

$40 for a light, and better contrast, and better resolution. 800×600 was getting pretty long in the tooth; cramming 1024×768 into the same space may not sound like much, but I'm looking forward to the higher pixel density for sure.

And faster page turn speed. None of it is worth it for what Amazon is trying to do with books: exclusivity deals etc. are going to turn books into cable tv and Amazon is leading the charge.

I honestly am not fussed about amazons sales model. Have Calibre, Will Travel.

I agree w/r/t hardware buttons. My wife has a Kindle Touch, and I find it nigh unusable from a UI standpoint, since there is so little feedback after touching the screen to turn the page, especially with PDFs. (Did I accidentally flip backward? Did the software crash again?)

I was also surprised that the basic model was not upgraded to the new screen. I think the cheapest kindle is actually the best one to get, because of hardware buttons. I won't be upgrading it anytime soon, it seems.

The basic model appears to have a higher contrast screen, at least.

Well, no. From what I can see, all the "PaperWhite" models have a touch screen (which I really do not want) and no hardware buttons (which I really do).

So, no upgrade path for me. I'm sticking to my current Kindle.

I use a nook touch, and I stopped using the mechanical buttons after I realized how nice it is to just tap the screen instead. A tap on the left side means back, tap on the right side forward. Not that hard, and feels really nice. I found swapping gestures to be too long, and slightly unstable as well. Does the kindle support page turns by tapping?

Does every product launch have to be about replacing existing gear? Our expectation that good products need to replace what we have seems pathological. I have friends with first gen iPhones that they love. I've subsisted on a ten year old Nokia before...

I agree. I wrote the following after having used my Kindle Keyboard for a few weeks:

What’s really remarkable about the device is how relaxing it is to use. ... The e-ink screen, at the cost of some functionality and elegance, is not only relaxing to the eyes, but also completely kills the low-grade but omnipresent anxiety of a touch screen. Which means you don’t have to worry about triggering a destructive action by accidentally brushing the screen somewhere and grip-placement is a lot less restrictive, i.e. if it’s most comfortable to hold by a corner of the actual screen, you can. The physical buttons mean that you know for sure when you’ve made an input. And the incredible battery life means I have literally never had to think about charging the device. I plug it in to sync to Instapaper (more on this later) often enough that I’ve never even come close discharging the whole battery, even on long trips. And while you get used to having to deal with all of these things using a modern smartphone, once you don’t have to anymore the immersiveness of the reading experience is truly unmatched. http://blog.byjoemoon.com/kindle

I really feel like in some contexts (reading device, cars) touch screens are more gimmick than feature.

I think they are less concerned about making people buy another kindle than getting a kindle into the hands of everybody. They make money with selling ebooks.

Yep, like they said in one slide, they don't want to make money when you buy it, they want to make money when you use it.

Question - why do you prefer the hard keys to the touchscreen page turns? BTW the non-touch model is still available, it has the hard keys.

I have a Kindle Keyboard and a Nexus 7 with the Kindle app. Lately I've been reading more on the Nexus 7, but when I use the touchscreen to turn pages it has a very high error rate. I usually turn the page by tapping the screen on one side or the other, but as often as not, my tap has a bit of a slide to it, and if that slide goes the wrong way I get the wrong page. It's really very annoying.

(I don't know if the touchscreen Kindles have the same tap/slide interaction; I'm just reporting my experience with the Kindle hardware and software I have.)

It would be much less annoying if I had the option to disable sliding entirely and just respond to taps without regard to any sliding motion. Then I could tap one side of the screen or the other reliably.

But seriously, one side of the screen or the other? Haven't they heard that people hold the Nexus 7 with one hand while reading - and not always the same hand? If I'm holding it with my left hand, it's not easy to get my thumb all the way to the right side to do a tap page flip.

If this worked like the late great FictionWise eReader software, I'd have the option of ignoring all sliding motion and tapping the bottom of the screen for the next page or the top of the screen for the previous page. Then it would work identically with whichever hand I'm holding the device.

Now consider the Kindle Keyboard: Each side has a big next-page and a smaller previous-page button. It's trivial to hold the device with either hand and rest my thumb on the next-page button. I can click that button when I want, without moving my hand at all! No worries about tapping the wrong side of the screen, accidentally sliding the wrong way, or anything. It just works.

I bought a Nexus 7, thinking that it would replace my Kindle (with the benefit of also being a tablet). I found that, even thought the Nexus 7 is higher resolution, it's harder on my eyes for some reason. So I sold the Nexus 7 and went back to the Kindle...

You can turn the pages using the volume buttons (enabled from Settings on the home screen). I reallly love that feature.

Thanks for the detailed explanation! And also, thanks for the mention of Fictionwise! I was actually the dev manager for Fictionwise's entire eReader apps line (iPhone, Android, Mac, PC, Blackberry). I later moved to the Nook team after the acquisition and I'm currently on the Kindle team at Amazon. Your feedback is really valuable and hasn't fallen on deaf ears.

Whoa - so you worked on eReader? That is too cool. If you're in Cupertino these days let me buy you lunch or a beer. eReader was the killer app for me back in the Windows CE/Windows Mobile days.

While I've got you, then, I'll mention the other two major features I really miss from eReader:

1) The ability to turn off right justification and select ragged right margin instead. This is what made eReader so usable on my tiny old Windows Mobile screens, and it still matters when reading on any phone-sized screen. The extra gaps and rivers of whitespace resulting from flush justification really interfere with readability.

2) The ability to turn off all animation. eReader would just show me the next page without no fuss. Of course the e-ink Kindles work like this, but all the Kindle apps seem to do some kind of animation.

Here's another big wishlist item. I would really like the ability to sync not to the farthest page read, but to the most recent page read. I often jump around in a book, look at footnotes at the end, etc. before starting to read through it from the beginning. This makes the "farthest page read" sync useless in many cases.

OK, this is obviously not the right forum for Kindle suggestions - if you can point me to a better place to send them in I'll be happy to do it. :-) Thanks!

Thanks Stratoscope, for summarizing most of the feedback i would've wanted to give about the hardware buttons, since i use them exactly like you do.

The Kindle App on Android could need more customization features, i find it very important to be able to change the text color to a grey or brown on a black background.

On the Samsungs AMOLED Displays that don't emit any light when the color is black this makes for a great reading experience in the dark since its perfectly readable while dark enough without keeping you artificially long awake.

The only app i found that offers all the features i need is a chinese one, which sometimes shines through...

EDIT: It's called iReader if anyone is wondering: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chaozh.iRe...

I work in Cupertino - let's grab lunch and chat about eReading. Email in profile

Ha! You may think your email is in your profile, but that one is hidden. It has to go in the About section for anyone to see it.

Having said that, I'm embarrassed to admit that I also had my email only in the email field in my profile, so if you went to look you wouldn't see it. That's fixed now! So drop me a note, or I'll look for your updated profile later. :-)

"But seriously, one side of the screen or the other? Haven't they heard that people hold the Nexus 7 with one hand while reading - and not always the same hand? If I'm holding it with my left hand, it's not easy to get my thumb all the way to the right side to do a tap page flip."

Yeah, this is one big problem. One-handed reading is key for public transit, where one hand may be occupied keeping yourself upright.

I also find that when I use the Kindle app on the iPad, or iBooks for that matter, I often end up with undesired taps changing the page, or even taking me to a page far from where I want to be. With physical buttons it's easier to avoid this. With touch screens and narrow bezels, it's very easy to encroach upon the screen and unintentionally 'tap', when you're just trying to hold onto the device.

The way I hold the kindle rests my thumb lightly against the next page button. I only have to do the tiniest movement to change the page. Tapping on a touch screen is unattractive by comparison.

I would prefer a model with touch and hard keys, but it doesn't look like that's forthcoming, so I stick with the basic model.

I can use my left hand to turn to the next page on my Kindle 3. I don't know how the touchscreen works on the Kindle hardware, but the tablet versions of Kindle software a tap on the left side moves to the previous page.

Agree, being an owner of a Kindle Touch I am occasionally frustrated by its refusal to acknowledge I want to change pages. There are times where I simply turn it off and on just so I can page change.

Still, I think I have some gifts for Christmas. While this might not be enough for me to upgrade it will be a nice gift for a few relatives I know who love to read.

I am however more interested in their other tablets as children's gifts.

On a side note, I will give Amazon credit for making a resilient device. I left mine out overnight and it got caught in a full down pour. Found it on the table outside with water to the brim. Shook it out, put it port side down in the bathroom sink with a hair dryer aimed at it for the morning and the damn think still works as well as day one.

> The hardware buttons for the page turn are the essential feature i love

Interesting, I often find myself swiping across my (3rd Gen Keyboard) screen wishing I didn't have to use those buttons to turn a page.

I find that it depends on your seating position when reading. If you sit upright, it would be easy to hold the device with one hand and swipe with the other. I however often find myself laying on my side reading, this makes swiping quite a lot harder.

The higher contrast is pretty neat, but was hoping Amazon had figured out how to significantly improve on the slow response rate of E-Ink.

Slow UI or animations (ahem, looking at you iOS/OSX), are for me personally, a serious distraction to the reading experience.