Amazon Kindle Special Offers Are a Disgrace

Amazon launched a series of slick and yesterday. All of them look to be strong contenders, if not outright winners, in their respective categories.

Less noticed among all the hoopla—and certainly, Amazon didn't call attention to it—is that all of its devices are subsidized with ads. Or, as the company facetiously calls them, "Special Offers."

I can't believe I'm not seeing more about this in the press coverage. Amazon first pulled this stunt last year, with the 4th generation Kindles (and, retroactively, to the renamed Kindle Keyboard). The advantages to Amazon are obvious: Special Offers let the company introduce devices at lower price points than they would have been otherwise, and the ads drive more revenue to sales of other products on its website, since it's still first and foremost an online retailer.

The advantages to consumers, however, are much less certain. I don't want mandatory ads on a device I own. It's different on the Web; if you don't like the way a site shows ads, you can visit another site. It's different on TV; you can change the channel, or you can watch public television, or not watch broadcast TV and instead view DVDs. Instead, imagine your PC or Mac had ads built into the desktop and the screensavers, and that you couldn't remove them. A few low-tier PC manufacturers even tried this many years ago, in an effort to bring down the base price of the PC. They were quickly buried and forgotten.

I bought my own Amazon Kindle last year—the $79 model—and then immediately paid Amazon the requisite $30 to disable the ads. That effectively made my $79 Kindle a $109 Kindle, or $10 more than the ad-free Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch, which has a touch screen—my Kindle didn't. If I had bought the $99 Kindle Touch, and then wanted to disable ads, it would have been $40, not $30, raising the price to $139.

They Really Are Ads
Last year, when I first reviewed the 4th generation and for PCMag, I dinged them pretty hard for Special Offers, although we still awarded the lower-priced device Editors' Choice. In a subsequent email to me, an Amazon spokesperson defended the ads, saying they were "really so unobtrusive" and that they're "never in your reading experience."

The thing is, part of the reading experience is picking up the book. Each time you pick up the Kindle to start reading, you'll have to click through an ad. Go get a cup of coffee, come back to the book, and you'll see another one. When your child picks up the ebook reader, that's the first thing she sees. How is that not part of the reading experience?

Another one of Amazon's defenses is that Special Offers are really just that—they're not straight ads, but offers that let you save money on products that you normally wouldn't have access to otherwise. That's great; if I want them, let me sign up for them. Don't force them on me, and then charge me $30 or $40 to disable them.

It's as if we're all letting Amazon get away with something. By not making a bigger deal about it, it's a tacit acknowledgement that Amazon's business practices are just fine, even though it gives the company an easy and unfair way to undercut its competitors at our expense.

Barnes & Noble doesn't do this with any of the Nooks. Sony doesn't do this with any of its Readers. If Apple suddenly said its included Special Offers, people would go ballistic. Google's doesn't contain ads. What if those vendors started doing it too, in order to even the playing field?

Even the $500 Kindle Fire HD Has Them
What's bothering me most as a tech journalist is that when you compare tablets or ebook readers across the board, people are going to see that the 7-inch Kindle Fire HD and the Google Nexus 7 both cost $199. Or that the Kindle Paperwhite costs $119, or $20 less than the Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch With GlowLight. But the Amazon product is the only one forcing ads on you; none of the competing vendors resort to such deceptive tactics. (If you want the Paperwhite model without ads, it's $20 more, of course.)

The fact that the will also have Special Offers built in is the ultimate disgrace. Imagine spending $500 for a brand new tablet computer, one that rivals the Apple iPad with Retina display, and being forced to endure ads while using it the entire time. As far as I can see, Amazon isn't offering any way to disable the ads on the Kindle Fire HD even by paying more. You can bet someone's going to figure out how to root this thing and disable the ads almost immediately.

In modern society, advertising is an unfortunate fact of life. But we still have ultimate control over how much we're exposed to them. When it gets to the point that I'm forced to see ads just by using a gadget—for any task, at any time, no matter what—that's where I draw the line. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go get more coffee from a machine that won't show me any advertising—at any point during the process.

What do you think about Amazon's Special Offers? Let me know in the comments below.

Update: Amazon confirmed that owners of the Kindle Fire HD will be able to for $15.

For more from Jamie, follow him on Twitter @jlendino.