The bundle includes a Amazon Fire HD 8 (normally $130), a year’s subscription to the Kindle Unlimited e-book catalog (normally $10 per month), a leather case and all the typical reading features we’ve come to expect from Amazon devices. The free Kindle Unlimited subscription, though, is mitigated by the price of the Reader’s Edition, which is $100 more than the $150 list price of the regular Fire HD 8. Additionally, the Fire HD 8 Reader’s Edition comes with a year of Kindle Unlimited, which allows you to read as much of the 1 million books in that library as you want, and a “limited edition” leather cover that ships in a “rustic brown” color.
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It’s certainly a useful feature, but as part of the new Fire OS “Bellini” rollout, Blue Shade is already available for other Amazon Fire tablets anyway. This feature changes the color temperature to other colors rather than blue, in order to assure a pleasant reading experience in dark environments. This includes the Bookerly Font, which is an exclusive font designed from the ground up for reading on digital screens.
The Reader’s Edition is targeted at readers, and its highlight feature is Blue Shade, a display optimization program that limits exposure to blue light at night. Plus, it extends your battery life by up to 25% while reading at default Blue Shade brightness. The chip powering the show is a quad-core processor listed at 1.5GHz, and while we’re unsure of the RAM, the storage is listed at 8GB. It can also stand the Fire HD in landscape or portrait orientation to let users read hands-free.
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“We’ve already sold millions of Fire tablets since launch, and we’re excited to now make it available to customers in China”, said Neil Lindsay, vice president for Amazon Devices. The protective case opens like a book and folds flat for one-handed reading. However, the new version actually costs $120 more than the normal Fire HD 8 incarnation, so there is no real savings to be made just now.
