Amazon has a cool promotion going on; you can trade in an old Kindle and get a giftcard for $5 to $35, depending on model and condition, plus an extra $20 that can only be used to the purchase of a new Kindle. However, if you’re going to do this, don’t be in a hurry; I sent mine off on January 7th and it has just been delivered, after taking a scenic tour of the Midwest. Amazon is still saying it’s not arrived, even though their tracking shows it was delivered this morning.
I actually had three working Kindles on hand. One was a Kindle Keyboard I decided to replace because my brother had given me a gift card and I wanted to see if the front-lighting feature on the Paperwhite would be useful to me. (It definitely is! So nice to be able to read easily even if the room is a bit dim, or to read in bed without a light to annoy Ted.) The second one is that first Paperwhite; I decided to replace it after a cat stepped on the screen putting too much weight on one claw and left a tiny divot that shows a spot of light. It still works; I just wasn’t sure it would keep working, so I bought a new one.
The reason I want yet another Kindle is that this newest one is annoying me; I believe it’s an older version of the Paperwhite that had only 2Gb of memory instead of the current 4. I have a lot of Kindle books, and I prefer to keep as many as possible on the device because I don’t entirely trust cloud backups. (Or rather, I don’t trust the people who own their servers to keep them operational long term. Yes, I know, you kids get off my lawn!) Whenever I load too many on it either tells me it’s low on memory and can’t take notes (I don’t care) or refuses entirely to add new books.
Also, work gave me a giftcard for Christmas that, with the money from this trade-in, will go a long way toward buying a new Voyage.
At least, it will when and if they ever get these old Kindles and accept them! Hopefully they’ll give me the full $30 on at least the Keyboard, since there’s nothing wrong with it.