About Those “Special Offers” On The New Kindle Fire HD…

We’re sharing this piece from the Kindle Nation Daily Digest, the newsletter of our parent site, Kindle Nation Daily, since many of you have probably already ordered the new Kindle Fire HD and a lucky few may even already have them in hand.

It seems that one way Amazon is able to offer this new, souped-up, HD version of the Kindle Fire without any price increase over the first-generation Kindle Fire is by bundling it with “Special Offer” ads by default. Don’t panic: you can disable them, and this post will tell you how, but you may find you’d rather keep them. Read on:

We’ll have our first detailed hands-on reviews of the Kindle Fire HD later this week, but we did want to share some basic information about the on-Kindle ads that have created a bit of controversy. Amazon had a bit of a hiccup about this at launch, but they’ve straightened things out reasonably well.

First, the new Kindle HD units that are supposed to arrive Friday are ad-supported. Revenue from ads is clearly part of the equation that allowed Amazon to price these units below $200.

Second, it’s a snap to turn the ads off directly on your Manage Your Kindle page, and the cost of “unsubscribing” is $15, compared with $30 for previous ad-supported eInk Kindles.

Third, I hope you’ll give yourself a couple of days to work with the ad-supported Kindle Fire HD, if you’ve got one on the way, before you pull the plug on the ads. They are totally unintrusive to the reading experience, and my experience with the ad-supported eInk Kindle (which we took to calling the Kindeal) has been that the ads paid for themselves in a very short time, as I explained in this July 2011 post:

But if you do want to pull the plug on the ads, like I say, it’s a snap. Just go to your Manage Your Kindle page, locate and select Manage Your Devices, and find the Kindle in question, as here:

Then click on the link that says Edit next to the word Subscribed, and you’ll see this dialogue box pop up:

Make your selection, and you’re done!

And there you have it. Maybe give it a couple of weeks, to see if you find the offers are to your liking. If not, the option is always there to turn them off.