It’s not practical to carry a whole stack of physical books, but an e-reader lets you take your entire library with you wherever you go. Thankfully, Amazon’s latest kindle It’s currently on sale at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target in its ad-supported configuration for $79.99 ($30 off) or without ads for $99.99 ($30 off), which is a new low price. Amazon, Best Buy and Target also have the latest discounts Kindle Paperwhite $124.99 with ads ($35 off), which is only the second time it’s been available at this price. The ad-free Kindle Paperwhite is available for the first time from Amazon for $144.99 ($35 off).
Amazon’s latest Kindle is our favorite cheap e-reader, and it’s a solid choice if you’re just buying e-books. It has USB-C charging and a six-inch 300ppi e-ink display, which is much less reflective than the LCD or OLED screen on your phone. It’s also equipped with 16GB of storage – enough to hold thousands of books – and a battery that can last up to six weeks per charge. It can also store and play audiobooks if you connect a pair of Bluetooth speakers or headphones, though, keep in mind that audiobooks use significantly more storage than e-books.
For compatibility, you can purchase titles from Amazon’s digital bookstore directly on the Kindle, or purchase them on another device and download them to the e-reader later. You can also sync individual documents to other file formats, including PDF, using the Kindle app on your phone or the web. The basic Kindle doesn’t have extra features like waterproofing or a physical page-turning button, but it’s still a great option at its current selling price.
If you want something more fully featured, there’s the 11th-generation Paperwhite, which we’d argue is the best Kindle for most people, thanks to its inclusion of many features you won’t find on the entry-level model. The first is that it has a large, 7-inch 300ppi display with an adjustable warm white frontlight, which lets you tint the display to make reading easier on your eyes at night. It offers twice the battery life as the entry-level model (six weeks vs. 12 weeks), though, like most of Amazon’s cheapest e-readers, it’s limited to 16GB of storage.
If you’re concerned about speed, the latest Paperwhite is about 20 percent faster than previous models, which means pages will load more quickly as you flip through them. Meanwhile, the IPX8 rating can provide some extra peace of mind if you read at the beach, by the pool, or while bathing. It should be able to withstand up to two meters of fresh water for up to an hour, which is, frankly, more than enough protection for most people.