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With next round of Kindles, Amazon is making it harder to go ad-free

With the latest price cut to its Kindle Offers Kindle Keyboard Wi-Fi, Amazon is making it harder and harder to justify buying the advertisement-free version of the eReader.
Written by Ricardo Bilton, Contributor

Amazon is playing an interesting game with the pricing of its ad-supported Kindle eReaders.

When the company launched the Kindle Offers-supported version of the Kindle Wi-Fi back in April, it dropped the price of the device $25 to $114. The Kindle 3G saw a similar drop, moving from $180 to $164.

But with the next round of Kindle eReaders, Amazon is doing something a bit different, opting to make the ad-supported Kindles the default models rather than the ad-free versions. The Kindle Touch Wi-Fi with Special Offers will sell for $99, while its ad-free counterpart will go for $139. Amazon barely mentioned the latter version during the Kindle Touch's unveiling.

But here's the interesting part. In addition to announcing the $99 Kindle Touch, Amazon also dropped the price of the current Special Offers Kindle Keyboard Wi-Fi to $99. This is significant because though Amazon dropped the price of the add-supported model, it chose not to do the same for its ad-free counterpart. Clearly the company is trying to push new consumers towards its Offers Kindles by making the price discrepancy between the different versions of the tablets too significant to ignore.

What this means is that buying a Kindle without advertisements is going to cost you an extra $40 rather than $25. How many people are actually bothered by advertisements enough to still go with the ad-free Kindle? It wouldn't be much of a stretch to say not very many.

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