I’ve got some bad news to share. The price of Kindles suddenly skyrocketed overnight, and they are now $40-$50 more expensive than the were just yesterday.
The 16GB Kindle Paperwhite is now priced at $199 for the ad-supported version, up from $159. The Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition is now selling for $249. That’s a $50 price increase overnight!
The price of the basic Kindle went up by $40. It’s now selling for $149 with ads, and it’s $169 without.
The price of the Kindle Colorsoft has gone up as well. The 16GB version is now $289 instead of $249, and the Signature Edition is now $319 instead of $279.
The only Kindles not affected by the price increase are the Kindle Scribes, but they were already priced really high comparatively.
Just about every company but Amazon has increased the prices of their ereaders over the past year. The same goes for a number of other electronic devices, thanks to AI eating up all the RAM and raising the prices to absurd levels never seen before. Now it looks like Kindles are finally being affected as well. The good news is Amazon puts Kindles on sale often, and they’ll probably have another big sale in October, but the days of super cheap Kindles might be gone for good.
Update: This article was updated to edit out the parts about ad-free Kindles being priced normally because a few minutes later the prices went up on those as well. Then I checked again and now some are priced lower again, like the ad-free matcha Kindle for $129, and the pink Paperwhite for $179. They can’t seem to get the prices straight so who knows what’s going on.
Interestingly, Kindle Scribe models are currently available in Spain at rock-bottom prices. The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft has dropped below €500 for the first time. Prices for the other Kindle e-readers remain unchanged. Perhaps this is a sign of a price rise on the horizon for the smaller models.
I’m especially surprised they raised the Basic price that much. It is several years old, doesn’t have waterproof protection, and doesn’t have warmlight which has been out for years, no extra bells and whistles and their smallest device. Quite a jump.
Here in the UK they increased the prices but added ‘sales’ on everything that restores it to their original price.
Just checked your link for the ad-free Matcha Kindle and it’s showing 169.99 for me, so it must have bumped back up.
Looks like I bought my ColorSoft at the right time. By the way I really like it despite the latest update that causes a blank page at times. Hopefully it gets fixed soon. I also have the PaperWhite SE that is great and yes it sometimes gets the same blank page.
I have the Colorsoft, too. The “Vera” jailbreak makes you independent.
I made a comment on another post recently… That the only one that can kill the Kindle, is Amazon.
I joked that they were trying… But, I guess they succeeded.
Bouncing prices? Sounds like algorithmic pricing.
Amazon is raising the price of the Kindle Basic by $40 because that’s how much 16gb chips has gone up? How stupid do they think we are?
In Canada, the Paperwhite and Colorsoft have gone up $90-100!!
I couldn’t believe it.
Not just Kindles. Echo devices, Fire TV Sticks, and pretty much Amazon’s entire hardware lineup. A price increase isn’t surprising, but the size of some of these jumps definitely is.
What bothers me more is that Amazon appears to have removed the price history option from many of these products, making it harder for customers to see just how steep the increases actually were. Raise your prices if you want, but conveniently removing the receipts at the same time is pretty sketchy. Glad I stocked up during Prime Day.
Not a smart move, and probably will cost them some money (as it should).
clever move from amazon. they get free promotions all over the internet just by changing the prices for their locked-in e-ink devices.
I’ve been on the fence between a kindle basic and kobo Clara BW for the past month. With the price increases it was a no brainer. I ordered the Clara this afternoon. I can’t believe I paid less for a waterproof device that has warm light, no lockscreen ads, and the ability to sideload my books without hacking the software.
Kindles don’t require hacked software to sideload books. In fact Send-to-Kindle is one of the main advantages over Kobo. The Clara BW is clearly the better value now, though, no arguing that.
It’s still a bit of a hassle to convert an EPUB collection to MOBI or AZW3 for Kindle.
Only if you sideload books. Using SendtoKindle website you don’t have to convert files.