Amazon’s October Prime Day (officially called Prime Big Deal Days) starts on October 7th, but waiting a week won’t be necessary to score a great deal. Amazon has already discounted the Kindle Kids, Kindle Paperwhite Kids, and Kindle Colorsoft Kids e-readers to their lowest prices ever. All of the kid-friendly Kindles have 16GB of storage and are ad-free. They also come with a cover, expanded parental controls panel, six or twelve month subscription to Amazon Kids Plus, and two year “worry-free guarantee” that covers hardware replacements if they break. Both Best Buy and Target are price matching Amazon’s discounts in case you’d prefer to shop there.
Kicking things off, the latest Kindle Kids is marked down to $94.99 ($35 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target. The e-reader has a six-inch e-ink display, with four built-in lights so kids can read in the dark. Its battery lasts up to six weeks per charge, but will drain more quickly when its screen brightness is turned up. The Amazon Parent Dashboard allows you to see which books your kid has read and how long they were reading for. You can also set daily screen time limits, share purchased content, and manage which books they can download from the Amazon Kids Plus library.
The Amazon Kids Plus service includes unlimited access to a library of age-appropriate books, audiobooks, and graphic novels, including titles from The Chronicles of Narnia and Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. If you want to continue a Kindle Kids subscription once the included membership expires, it’ll cost $5.99 per month ($48 per year) for Amazon Prime members, or $7.99 per month ($79 per year) for non-Prime Members.
The newest Kindle Paperwhite Kids is the child-friendly version of our favorite e-reader, and it’s on sale for $134.99 ($45 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target. It runs the same software as Amazon’s entry-level Kindle, but has many meaningful hardware improvements. The two most significant changes are its larger, seven-inch display, and a battery that lasts up to 12 weeks per charge.
The Kindle Paperwhite Kids has an IPX8 waterproof design, which means the e-reader can be submerged completely underwater without getting damaged. It’s the better choice for reading during bath time or at the beach. It also has an adjustable warm light, which can tint the screen amber to make it more comfortable to read at night. These hardware tweaks make the Kindle Paperwhite Kids a better choice for more voracious readers whose hands are big enough to handle the larger device comfortably.
The newest Kindle Colorsoft Kids is Amazon’s latest kid-friendly e-reader, and the first one with a color display. Right now you can pick one up on sale for $209.99 ($60 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target. The Kindle Colorsoft Kids hardware has a lot in common with Kindle Paperwhite Kids. It has a seven-inch screen, IPX8 waterproof design, and adjustable warm light. Its battery lasts eight weeks, which is a fair trade for its color screen.
The display makes illustrations in picture books and graphic novels look closer to their physical book counterparts than the grayscale versions on other Kindle models. The screen drops from 300ppi (pixels per inch) to 150ppi when reading in color, but a kid may not be as sensitive to that shift as an adult. Amazon also includes a twelve-month Amazon Kids Plus subscription with the Kindle Colorsoft Kids, which improves its value.
