This article was automatically translated from Japanese using AI. The Japanese version is the authoritative version.
I’d been wanting to read at night, and with Amazon Black Friday on, I decided to buy a Kindle.
The thing is, there are about four Kindle variants to choose from.
I used to have a Kindle Paperwhite from a few 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 that the basic Kindle also gets good reviews, and since I just plan to use it hard and only read at night, I figured the cheaper one would do and 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 paid around 2,000 yen for the device.
What a deal!!!!
Here’s the actual Kindle.
The first thing that struck me 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 has a lower resolution on paper, but you’d only notice that in a side-by-side comparison; in practice the image quality is more than enough for reading.
Reflections are also kept well in check, and reading at night doesn’t tire my eyes at all. My first impression was that it’s better than I expected.
What I disliked most about the old Kindle Paperwhite was how sluggish it was; searching for books or turning pages was fairly stressful. This Kindle is noticeably faster than that, roughly like using a slightly older smartphone.
Given the price gap, whether the other models are worth more than twice as much really depends on the person, but the basic Kindle offers excellent value and works well 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 go buy one too—kattemitekudasai.