Amazon’s latest Kindle Paperwhite is nearly matching its Black Friday low

If you missed the first sale on the 2024 Kindle Paperwhite during Black Friday, now’s your chance to write your own redemption arc. Right now, you can get Amazon’s newest ad-supported ebook reader at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target for $134.99 ($25 off). That’s still $5 shy of its all-time low, but it’s a pretty good discount this early into its life. You can also get it without ads at Amazon for $154.99 ($25 off).

There’s not much incentive to upgrade if you already own an older Paperwhite, but if you’re an avid reader, you’ll likely appreciate the newly minted seven-inch display, which is the biggest of any Paperwhite to date. It’s also 25 percent brighter than the previous model and features a higher contrast ratio, allowing for improved readability. The jump from 10 weeks of battery life to three months is a more substantial upgrade — as is a new processor, which supposedly makes a big difference when it comes to page-turning speeds — but we’ll need to finish putting Amazon’s latest e-reader through its paces before rendering our final verdict.

However, despite the iterative nature of the aforementioned updates, there’s a good chance the 12th-gen Paperwhite is going to remain the best option for most people. Amazon’s new entry-level Kindle is a bit smaller (and slower), and while the jazzy Kindle Colorsoft offers the best color screen on an e-reader so far, it will run you an extra $120 over the Paperwhite. That’s a lot for a non-essential upgrade.