About Kindles with Special Offers:
Amazon has been offering a Kindle Wi-Fi with Ads for a $25 discounted price–$114 instead of $139 and recently added Kindle 3G with Special offers, regularly $189 is now $164. $139.*  When I first heard about this offer I thought

$25 is not enough to make anyone put up with commercials! 

Recently I stumbled upon a Kindleboard commenter who loved the special offers and bragged about how much they’ve saved using them. Huh?
I decided to find out more about these offers and found it’s not a bad deal after all.

“Special Offers” do NOT appear IN your eBooks or interfere with reading!

They appear as Screensavers instead of the Author Portrait and other, often weird, images–that’s not a bad thing. They also appear in a banner on the bottom of  your home screen.  Here are example images of credit card ads on Screen Saver and Home Page. I could live with these. 

According to Amazon past special offers include, a $20 Amazon Gift card, Choose a $1 Kindle Book from a book list of thousands, Spend $10 in Kindle books get a $10 Amazon Gift Card, $500 saving on a HDTV.  Who would be opposed to saving money?

Still, I don’t believe twenty-five bucks would make a significant enough price range change to make the Kindle affordable to those who can not afford $139.  It’s a shame they couldn’t at least discount the price to under $100

*Update: Kindle 3G w/Special Offers price was lowered to $139 between the writing and publishing of this post. A $50 discount, now they are talking. No reduction on the $114 Kindle WiFI  w/Special offers. Yet?

Related articles: Amazon, AT&T Announce Ad-Supported Kindle 3G for $139 (pcworld.com)

Note: The Kindle images are not crooked; it’s an optical illusion!