Kindle Paperwhite E-reader (Previous Generation - 7th) - Black, 6" High-Resolution Display (300 ppi) with Built-in Light, Wi-Fi + Free Cellular Connectivity - Includes Special Offers

Let me guess: you love books, but you're not sure you want to get a kindle because you love the feel of books, right?I'm here to tell you that the kindle is the perfect balance of book and digital format.SHORT REVIEWYes, you should buy a kindle. Get the paperwhite with no ads. You're welcome.LONG REVIEWI love physical books too, I'm with you. But I know myself, and I know that once I forget to take the book I'm reading with me, that's it. I'll start another book and rarely finish the first. I also know if I try and read on my phone or iPad that I'll get distracted and start wondering about what's happening on the internet (Instagram's not gonna scroll ITSELF). Either way I'm not finishing the book.WHY KINDLEThe kindle takes the best of both worlds and mashes them together. The e ink display is honestly incredible. I wish iPhones had an e ink display. It really looks just like a printed page. So you get the experience of reading a physical paper book, but with the perks of being digital.Namely:- Share what book you're reading to Goodreads, Facebook, or twitter (so you can look SMORT)- Built in dictionary (so you can learn the proper spelling of the word SMORT)- Export your highlights as a PDFPlus, it'll also sync with the kindle app on your phone so you can squeeze in the final few pages of the chapter while you're in the bathroom (don't pretend you don't do that. You're either on your phone or you're reading the febreeze ingredients)READING IN BEDThe backlight looks great. It's a perfect size. And because it's one page at a time, you overcome another annoyance of physical books: you can read laying down in bed without the awkward "I just need to hold the book weird like this for a second while I finish the left page, then I'll be on the right page and can relax" situation. It's great.LIBRARY BOOKSYou can check out library books digitally without leaving your house. And yes, you can make highlights and export those as a PDF (to answer your next question, yes, you could technically highlight the whole book, but that would take more time than it's worth).ADS OR NAH?Get the one without ads. Remember the problem with reading on your phone? Distractions. Why would you buy a device that ONLY does one thing exceptionally well (isolated reading) and then ruin the experience with ads about products you should buy? Now you're thinking about "oh right, I gotta get my oil changed" or "what am I gonna make for dinner?" instead of whether Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy are really ever going to get together.WHICH MODEL?And no, you don't need a more expensive kindle. This one works great and the other ones don't give you much more for the money. Get the wifi only model (please, you're REALLY going to use the 3G to download books on the go? Get real).And yes, this is the best e-reader out there. Come on, it's Amazon. ANY book you want is a few taps away.WHAT YOU WANTKindle Paperwhite (wifi only, cuz really, you're gonna use 3G??) with no ads.You're furiggin welcome.

UPDATE (May 14, 2016) I have removed two stars.One of the stars, I removed because there are some rough edges, such as mentioned below. The biggest pain at the moment is that, after having highlighted scores of passages in a book and written many notes anticipating my review of a it, I find that to review those notes conveniently, I have to use a computer to access my Amazon account, and then jump through hoops to FIND and then to view those notes, and the only way to aggregate them is to copy the screen! Worse, I found NO documentation at this level. (The Kindle e-manual, included with the hardware, doesn't get to that level of detail.) Handling of PDFs is also poor. That's not exactly Kindle's fault, but it would be a more stellar product if it could convert a text PDF to Kindle format or something.The other star, I removed because since buying my Kindle Paperwhite at $140 for the ad-free version (i.e., no "special offers"), apparently Amazon has taken the ad-free version off the market. Or hidden it. However, they've done it so slyly that their behavior is disingenuous. One, it seems my question regarding this absence never got posted. Two, although a couple of recent answers to other people's questions indicate that the ad(s?) appear only when waking up the Kindle, there is no assurance of that. And three, Amazon doesn't itself explain (anywhere?) what they mean by "special offers," let alone show an example and describe how and when they appear. If you buy a magazine off the rack, you can see there are ads in it, okay. But you can't similarly evaluate a Kindle. And if you buy a physical paperback book, the publisher might have a page at the back that promotes other books. But what book has ads before the Table of Contents?I'm pleased and relieved to report that the Kindle I paid extra for does not show ads, even now (except for sample excerpts of books I might like, but that's a different process, something I chose to pursue). But for the reasons above, for now, Amazon, no extra stars for you!Update to the above Update (sorry) ...Apparently if you search Amazon just for "Kindle Paperwhite" or click the various links to see the full line, Amazon is not showing the $140 ads-free version (which is the version I bought a few months ago). However, via my review history, I was able to find that version, and as of today (May 14, 2016) it appears to be immediately available. I don't know how intrusive the "special offers" (ads) are; I'm relieved (and would not have expected otherwise) that my Kindle remains ad-free.To find the ad-free version, try searching for the full product description: Kindle Paperwhite E-reader, 6" High-Resolution Display (300 ppi) with Built-in Light, Wi-Fi------------------ORIGINAL REVIEWWhat can you say, it's a book. It's pretty easy to get started, and there's a manual included -- in Kindle format, of course. But it's a pretty basic device, and the basics are quickly evident, so I'll leave those to other reviews. Suffice it to say I finally sprang for a Paperwhite because I got tired of trying to read a tablet or computer in the sun, which is almost impossible. This has a backlight which improves contrast even in "readable light,", and the battery lasts a good long time even when the light is on full. The Kindle turns off automatically after a short bit. Press its button and you're right back where you left off. (You can set up a password if you want.)There may be various ways to import books and other documents, but I find it simplest to just email the file to my Kindle's special address as an attachment. To foil spam, the Kindle will accept emails only from authorized addresses.Unfortunately, in some ways it's not as practical as a book. You can highlight passages, and unlike a physical book, you can revise the highlights. It's only black and white (grayscale, actually, so images look pretty good), but when did I last have colors in my ordinary paperbacks?But it's NOT a tablet. If you want to take notes as you read, you can make them as you go (same process as highlighting a passage). In essence, the Kindle lets you easily "write in the margins." But if you want to notate longer thoughts than that, get yourself a few index cards, or a notepad and pencil, and maybe a Kindle cover that will also store them. A Kindle is NOT for making EXTENSIVE notes. Apparently there's no way to export your notes to any other device or media. You can share your notes with Facebook friends or the entire universe of Kindle users (or not), but you can't send them just to yourself. (And sorry, I don't feel a need to share my reading habits with even my closest friends any more than they need or want to see what I had for dinner.) You can't even copy them to another document in the Kindle. "Editing" a note means you can place the cursor in it and delete or type at that point, that's it. No copy/replace, etc. within the note. And if your note is very long, scrolling through it is a spotty process -- although the Kindle is very responsive with regard to page turns, going back, searching etc., it's balky at trying to scroll through a long-ish note. You can't even expand a note's window to use the full Kindle page.That's a disappointment, because I realized these limitations after I'd hit on the idea of inserting a note on a document's cover. It will be represented by a small number, probably in the upper right corner. I even uploaded a one-page custom PDF file for thoughts that occur to me while reading but not related to a particular document. That works, in theory, but has all the same limitations. Once I've accumulated a bunch of notes, I guess I'll have to manually type them into my computer while viewing them on the Kindle. So in that respect, an actual book is handier; you can slip a piece of paper into it.(One possibility I have yet to explore ... since Kindle documents are synchronized across all your linked Kindle platforms, MAYBE my notated documents will show up in the Kindle software on my PC etc., in which case they might be manageable. If that turns out to be the case, I'll edit this.)There are also rough edges in uploading documents. If you bought the book at Amazon, no problem. Depending on your preference settings, your Amazon account will keep your Kindle updated. In fact, it was maddening until I realized this. When I deleted some unwanted documents from the Kindle, they came right back. Turns out I needed to delete them from my Amazon account's collection, too.Unfortunately, if you didn't buy the book at Amazon (or maybe only if you didn't buy it in Amazon's MOBI or AZW3 format), the imported file will be shown among the Kindle's "Docs" collection, rather than its "Books" collection. And if you go through the process of teaching it what sort of book samples you might be interested in, you'll wind up with a few dozen books in your books list (the first chapter or two of each, I guess), cluttering up the list of books you actually want to see. The solution, for now, is to choose "view all" and/or "view recent," but when I've accumulated a lot of stuff, .... well, we'll have to see. (There are also categories for Periodicals and Collections.)You can upload other formats, too, including PDF. But the Kindle's display of even a text-based PDF is not so great. It totally depends on how the PDF was formatted. For example, I was relieved to find that my camera's manual would import cleanly. But, for some lame-brain reason, Canon formatted the manual as 9x5 (if you were to print it out on 8.5x11 paper). Imported to Kindle, it fits the device's landscape format, but the type is about the equivalent of 4-point type ... virtually unreadable. Because it is a PDF, not an e-book format, so although you can "zoom in" on a page (response is a bit balky), you can't adjust the type size. The document, on a PC, has clickable links. These don't work on the Kindle. (Touching the screen just goes forward or back a page, as you expect on the Kindle.)The document is text-based, so it is searchable, but Kindle does it no favors in this process, either. If the found word is at the top 1/3 of the page, it's covered by the search menu -- you won't see it till you close the menu. If you zoom the page, you lose the search menu, requiring you to start the search process from scratch to find the next occurrence. In other words, reading a PDF this way may be okay for an emergency, but it would have been much smarter for the PDF-creator (here, the camera manufacturer) to have created the document in a more compatible format, or created an e-book version in the first place. And/or would have been nice if Amazon had given more attention to this need.If you convert the PDF document to a book file format using an independent converter such as Calibre, be prepared to lose your PDF formatting (for better or worse, depends on the document) Also, if you have a cover image or text, in book format, it will become the book's cover. But if it's a PDF file, the "cover" will be the filename (or maybe the document's meta data?) in simple text created by the Kindle. I tried everything I could think of (using text, using an image, removing the cover and specifying it in the converter, etc.) ... if there's a way to keep the PDF's text formatting and also have its real cover, let me know. More importantly, I have encountered many PDF documents that just become layout-gibberish when converted, if they can be converted at all.Should you buy your non-Amazon ebooks in an Amazon format, or in some more broadly supported format such as ePub? I don't know. Still sorting that out, and will revise this when I have an answer. Meanwhile, someone other review here probably does. The reason I mention it is that if formatting and document organization is important to you, rather than just the words, it may make a difference.As for the Browser, it's an "experimental" product, and shows it. Okay when it works, but slow on the Wi-Fi connection, and unlike the Kindle, is clunky to use. You can zoom in on a page, but the browser is slow to redraw (again, this is a contrast -- the Kindle is very quick in book mode). Works in a pinch, but it won't replace your tablet.