Skip to main content

Amazon allows Kindle owners to pay extra to remove advertisements

Kindle_Features
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Those of you who are tired of staring at advertisements when playing around with the ad-supported Kindle now have an option to remove the advertisements for an additional fee paid directly to Amazon. The difference in price between the ad-supported model and regular model is $30, the exact fee needed to ditch the advertisements. The lowest cost ad-supported model sells for $79 while the model without ads can be purchased for $109. However, the difference on the Kindle Touch models is slightly more at $40. An ad-supported Kindle Touch sells for $99 while the regular model sells for $139. An ad-supported Kindle Touch 3G sells for $149 while the regular model is priced at $189. 

Kindle with Special Offers - BuickTo remove the advertisements and pay the upgrade fee, users can go to the “Manage Your Devices” page and unsubscribe from “Special Offers.” Fair warning: once the Kindle has been rid of the advertisements, it’s impossible to revert to the previous ad-supported model and get a refund on the upgrade fee. Amazon Special Offers come in the form of full-page screensavers and small ads on the homescreen. This upgrade program allows users to purchase the ad-supported models from Amazon and measure their level of annoyance with the advertisements. This also allows users that receive an ad-supported Kindle as a gift to upgrade and ditch the advertisements. 

Only the tablet-style Kindle Fire is currently without an ad-supported model. It’s likely that Amazon will roll out an ad-supported version of the tablet after the initial launch, likely taking advantage of the expanded media capabilities of the device.  The Kindle Fire is launching next month on November 15 and can be preordered for a cost of $199. Amazon is positioning the Kindle Fire as a media consumption device, designed to sell access to movies, music, books, magazines and games through Amazon’s marketplace.

Correction: Special Offers do not appear on the screen while reading e-books on the Kindle.  They do appear while reading through content on the Home Page. 

Mike Flacy
By day, I'm the content and social media manager for High-Def Digest, Steve's Digicams and The CheckOut on Ben's Bargains…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more