With so much attention paid to tablet computers nowadays, it’s natural to question the future of single purpose electronic readers. But Amazon remains bullish on its dedicated Kindle e-readers, even if the online retailing giant (with Kindle Fire) also competes in tablets.

On Tuesday, Amazon announced a brand new Kindle Paperwhite, the 6th generation of Amazon’s popular reader. At $ 119, it costs the same as its immediate predecessor and also sports a built-in light that lets you read in the dark without disturbing your partner. But the new Paperwhite is noticeably brighter when placed next to the original.

Amazon says it has a zippier processor too, leading to faster page turns and books that open faster, though I wasn’t able to evaluate the claim during an early look at the device. Amazon also says the new reader is more accurate to the smallest touches, another thing I’d have to judge in everyday use. The battery life is said to be the same eight weeks.

But most of the enhancements come with software. First there’s integration (coming later this fall) with Goodreads, an online e-reading community that helps you discover what your friends and other people are reading. Also coming to Paperwhite in roughly a month’s time is a version of Kindle FreeTime, a parental control feature that lets mom and dad choose the books their kids are reading and to monitor how much they’re doing. Parents can also see which definitions the kids are looking up and hand out achievement badges when the kids reach certain milestones.

Both kids and elders can take advantage of a new Vocabulary Builder that aggregates all the words you’ve looked up across any of the books you’ve read. The words appear in the context on the list (with the accompanying passages from a book). You can turn words into flash cards that can help you bone up on their meanings. If you have mastered the words, you can remove them from the list.

A new Smart Lookup feature is supposed to make it simpler to not only look up definitions, but to also access the previously available X-Ray feature that lets you explore the characters, ideas and concepts that fill a book.

During a demo of Paperwhite, I liked what I saw of a new Kindle Page Flip navigational feature that lets you skim page by page or scan through a book by chapter, all while keeping your current place in the book. It’s handy for looking back at Maps and other developments earlier in a book, without having getting lost.

The new 7.3-ounce Paperwhite ships at the end of September.

Amazon didn’t spell out when, or even if, the new Paperwhite features will come to other Kindles, but it’s a fair bet they’ll reach other models at some point.

Separately, Amazon announced a new Kindle feature coming in October, that will potentially appeal to anyone that has purchased a book through Amazon. It’s called MatchBook and it will let readers who have previously purchased a print book through Amazon buy the digital equivalent for $ 2.99 or less. Some 10,000 books will be available when MatchBook launches, at first from a combination of Harper Collins and Amazon’s own publishing unit. The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough, A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving and I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb are among the titles eligible for the program. Other participating authors include Ray Bradbury, Michael Crichton and Jodi Picoult.

“If you logged onto your CompuServe account during the Clinton administration and bought a book like Men Are from Mars, Women are from Venus from Amazon, Kindle MatchBook now makes it possible for that purchase—18 years later—to be added to your Kindle library at a very low cost,”says Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s vice president of Kindle Content. Amazon opened its first online bookstore in 1995.

Grandinetti says MatchBook can provide a “great incremental revenue stream for publishers and authors and is a feature that customers perceive with high value.” It’ll be up to publishers and authors to determine whether to make books that have gone through various editions or translations eligible for the program.

During an interview, Grandinetti also weighed in on the continuing viability of single purpose Kindles. “We think there is a long long long future ahead for dedicated e-reading devices,” he said. “The analogy that we’ve always used is running shoes. People play casual sports… and might have a regular sneaker that works well for them. But if you’re going to put five miles a day on the road, you actually want a pair of shoes that’s built for that purpose. And there are millions of people who read so frequently that having a dedicated e-reader device is really valuable to them.

Grandinetti went onto say that, “based on everything we know today there’ll be many more generations of our e-reading devices from here.”