Amazon Kindle (2019) - 6" Glare-Free Touchscreen E-Reader with Built-in Adjustable Front Light - Black | Includes 3 Months Free Kindle Unlimited (Auto-Renewal) | Perfect for Reading at Night, Travel & Book Lovers

I haven't done any e-reading in a while, so I figured I'd take a plunge with the "basic" Kindle. It's exactly what you'd expect with an entry-level model. To casual readers, it's a great start to get into ebooks for a change (although you can never beat the real deal).The last Kindle I had was a Kindle Touch, made in 2011. This is practically the same Kindle with the same e-ink panel, except the whole device is maybe a little thinner, slightly faster processor to turn pages faster, no button and no headphone jack, but you get a nice backlight in return. You still get the micro-USB cable, but you don't get a power adapter. Micro-USB is dated if most of your devices are using USBC nowadays. Month-long battery life is still the same, which is always nice because it's such an inherently low-power device.The touch functionality was the most disappointing part of the model, as it felt half of my presses were not registered. I had to return the Kindle because I thought it was defective. You really had to press hard to get it to detect, like punching your fingers on an older, resistive touchscreen smartphone.It's odd that a lot of fluent swiping is part of the input repertoire of how you interact with the Kindle, because the slow refresh of the e-ink screen makes it feel like an extremely dated Android tablet barely handling menu animations at <10FPS. Perhaps I'm being too nitpicky with the technology, but it doesn't go without saying that they're using the same 6" 167ppi e-ink panel that was used on my 2011 Kindle Touch. You'd think that the entry-level Kindle in 2019 would have made some substantial improvements along the way.I still find the "ad-supported" choice quite a strange arrangement of what we're forced to choose between here when shopping for Kindles. What happens is that when you connect this Kindle to Wifi and register it with your Amazon account, you get adware automatically installed on your Kindle. What this adware does is force the same stock advert on your lockscreen (plus a forced "swipe to touch" gesture to unlock, which is annoying), and you get ads to buy books on the home screen. I would suffice to say that having this Kindle connected to Wifi all the time will cut into your battery life. I think you need to pay $20 to get rid of these inconveniences, which still remains a cruel game to play on customers. Alternatively, keeping this Kindle offline will have you without those annoyances, but you can only sideload books via USB (EPUB not supported), the Kindle Store is cut off because there's no Wifi, and you can't perform firmware updates. Amazon should just sell the Kindles at the "ad-supported" price minus the adware. Just show off the deals in an email or when the user actually engages with the Store.The white case of the model was attractive, and I liked the all-plastic exterior compared to the rubber coating that eventually rots and becomes a sticky mess on other models. However, if you choose white, you'll find that it gets dirty a lot quicker with normal use. Slipping it inside a pocket or backpack will definitely cause marks to show up. The e-ink screen is also recessed in the casing, meaning that dirt, dust, and crumbs will collect in the edges.I do like the backlight, which gives the Kindle a much asked-for convenience as some of us like to read in the dark. It's a shame dark mode doesn't exist on this model, since all it does is simply invert the colors. It would have complimented the backlight well.However, Amazon had to choose a sickly, fluorescent blue color for the LEDs. I'm used to flux and warm-colored screens for nighttime screen viewing, which I am hoping is at least helping preserve my eyesight to some degree, but the blue lights gives me mild nausea and headaches after a while. That's just me, it's probably totally different for you. My eyes are sensitive.Overall, it's "okay" for a "basic" Kindle. It must have been deliberately engineered to hold off nicer features for the higher-tier models like the Paperwhite, which I ended up getting instead. The Paperwhite has the warm backlight, dark mode, USB-C, and a flat continuous screen with no recessing.If you never had a Kindle before, you might like this regardless of all of my whining above. If you want to make your e-reading experience a bit more comfortable than what the basic model can provide, then you might be happier going a step up to the Paperwhite.(In a stroke of irony after getting my Paperwhite, Amazon released a newer basic Kindle with better features.)I think Amazon has many Kindle e-Reader users who use their e-Readers every day, have thousands of volumes on their Kindles, purchase multiple e-books per week, read several thousand words per minute, and who often encounter more “You purchased this item on ...” in their frequent e-book browsing on Amazon.I know these users are disappointed with Amazon’s recently updated Kindles because I am one. I read many thousands of words per minute, had thousands of books on my Kindle, and purchase 20 to 30 books a month. I purchased my first paper back from Amazon in September 1995 and my first Kindle book in December 2011. I was disappointed with my 4th Kindle purchase, at 10th Generation, in February 2022 & my 5th today, a used 8th Generation.First, its screen touch event handling was buggy, often requiring 10 to 40 taps, and sometimes many hard thumb thumps to move to the next page. Worse, periodically after a long series of thumps it would flip page after page after page, frequently 50 or more pages, requiring a long backward search for my last read page. This unbelievably frustrating defect caused my reading speed to fall by more than half.Second, it repeatedly lost my book sorting options. At first I had to reboot the Kindle to enforce my desired sort option, but finally after an reset I only had to flip between the sort options to keep my books sorted as I desired.Third, the 'most recent' sorting option failed its book positioning, e.g., when you opened a book it did not move it to the first page of your library nor did it reposition you in your library.On March 16, 2022 Amazon installed a new version of software of my 10th Gen Kindle without my permission and later they did the same thing on a used 8th Gen Kindle. At 8AM on the March 16th I opened my 10th Generation Kindle E-Reader planning to return to my prior night's reading, instead I was invited to a new Kindle experience. After hitting NEXT-NEXT-NEXT more times than I could count and controlling my temper enough not to smash my Kindle into the wall I got to my library. Amazon had replaced the paged library entries with the scrollbar used on tablets and phone Kindle apps. A user interface I despise since it makes it impossible to review libraries with few hundred books. I have thousands. It is one reason I seldom use the Kindle app on my phone. A critical difference, however, is that this e-reader still has the touch event handling bugs, making the new scrollbar worse than useless.Anyone with any experience knows using scroll bars to navigate thousands of entries is an exercise in madness. And without scrolling keys extreme insanity. For example, consider the sorted 59 item 2-letter postal scroll bar for the US’s 50 states and 9 territories. Those from Montana, even the hunt-and-peck typists, undoubtedly feel frustrated hitting 'M' once and the down arrow 9 times to get to MT to pick your 2-letter state abbreviation with this scrollbar. After all, even hunt-and-peck typists from Montana probably have the location of the 'T' memorized.Before I scrolled down 1 page with this new interface it opened 2 long, 1,000+ page books I'd completed just days before. I had to wait for each download and open to complete, because I didn't see a cancel cross by the download like the previous version had, but I may have missed it because I was blind with rage by then. Worse, with this new scrollbar interface I could not find the book I was reading the night before. The most recent book I was reading. The book I wanted to resume reading when I picked my Kindle that morning. That book was not shown on the scrollbar!The prior version had a “GO TO PAGE” popup you reached by tapping the page number allowing me to find unfinished books easily, but that isn’t there anymore. Remember, Kindle E-readers do not have keyboards, no page up or down buttons, no scroll up or down keys. You must control everything include this new scrollbar with one finger on a screen that, has we know from my first complaint above, does not have good event controls.Now suppose you have a 2,000 item library that with the old Kindle display was spread over 400 pages and you knew that page 200 has your oldest unfinished books. Before 3/16/22 I only took five taps to get to any page between 100 or 400, but on my phone with the Kindle app’s scrollbar it took several minutes of fast finger flicking to fly through my library without looking at a title to reach that last page. And the phone’s Kindle app downloaded 3 titles on the finger scrolling efforts. Now Amazon has made this user interface standard across all Kindle platforms!Once you have a scrollbar widget, it's tempting and easy to dump everything into it. However, my old X-widget and HTML programming manuals from the mid 1980s clearly say scrollbar menus should be easily keyed and not be long, e.g., keyed like state abbreviation codes with no more than 60 items. The manuals all recommended partitioned, multi-level menus to handle more items. The manuals were written by the creators of these user interfaces at Xerox Park, UC Berkley, and Bell Labs.Now Amazon’s software engineers have put 2,000 items in a most recently accessed sort with no possible entry key. This is software engineering at its worst; I have not seen such poor software engineering in many, many decades. And it says a lot about how Amazon currently views its Kindle E-Reader customers that they'd release this poorly engineered user interface. Somehow I feed an Android/Google cabal at Amazon has takeAmazon probably will not fix any of these defects because Amazon has clearly made a conscious decision to abandon a solid user interface to reduce programming costs by using the same software across all devices supported by Kindle. I do not think Amazon is just trying to reduce Kindle support costs here. The Kindle e-Reader is what gave Amazon its dominance in the e-book market. I think an executive cabal is convinced the Android platform is best for users. Well, that cabal will hurt Amazon's e-book market.An Amazon consultant suggested I use the Kindle’s “Collections” feature to organize my books. Now I used this feature on my last Kindle, but I could not find those collections on the new one. Maybe they were there, but hidden. My previous collections were narrow ones anyway: “BORING”, “RAMBLES”, “STUPID”, and “BAD.”How should I arrange 2,000 volumes? 20 collections of 100 books each? 16 collections of 125 books each? 25 collections of 80 books each? What criteria should I use to make a collection? How about by year purchased? But then my most recent years would have hundreds of entries Besides, I once checked some of my “STUPID” collection and found out Amazon no longer sold some of the e-books. So I doubt I can even find out when I purchased all my e-books. No matter how I arrange these books I would encounter scrollbar menu overload searching my library. I prefer my original use of collections: “STUPID and BAD.”Regarding the title of this review, since 2011 as I became more and more sucked in by my good Kindle experiences, I've given away many thousands of hard copy books to libraries and charities. Amazon sucked me into believing they would only improve my Kindle experience, not screw it up. After 27 years as an Amazon customer and 11 as a Kindle user they made it FUBAR -- FOULED UP BEYOND ALL RECOGNITION.Now I'm sorry I gave away all that reading material. I cannot take my Mac to bed and I only use the Kindle smart phone app as a last resort. I've had to dug up my old night reading light and taken to wandering into used book stores. Amazon clearly doesn't care about its longtime customers anymore and has tossed human factor engineering in the trash.I’ve returned both Kindles and I wish I could get the monies I put into a gift card account for e-Book purchases back, but I cannot. I cannot put up with such poor human factors engineering on the part of Amazon. Until March 16th I had 4 years of continuous daily use of my Kindle and bought 4 or more e-books per week. Both streaks have ended and the phone, tablet, and PC apps have many more intolerable bugs than the Kindle e-Reader.For 11 years Kindle e-Readers provided me great reading experiences. Now I will not pay for an e-reader that provides a worse reading experience than the free Apps on my phone or tablet. Perhaps Amazon intends to drop this e-Reader.