Easy-on-the-Eyes Reader With Some Zip to It - Wall Street Journal

The new Kindle Paperwhite has some welcome improvements over last year’s model, including a faster processor and a nicer screen display.

Amazon

The Vocabulary Builder shows flashcards for all the words you’ve looked up while reading. At the top are buttons for home, back, lighting and a shopping cart.

But since it isn’t a blow-your-mind upgrade, Kindle lovers and e-reader newbies might be wondering whether it’s worth the price. This new e-reader, which starts at $ 119, shouldn’t be confused with Amazon’s Kindle Fire line, which consists of full-color tablets running apps.

I’ve been using the new Kindle Paperwhite for the past week, reading mostly media theory and economics books, which means I used it for less than an hour a night before I fell asleep.

Overall, the new Paperwhite is an excellent product, but it’s probably not a must-have for people who are perfectly happy with their 2012 Paperwhite. But it is very tempting.

The new device is a bit zippier than the 2012 version. The front-lit E-ink screen doesn’t have the shadows that plagued some of last year’s Paperwhites. Amazon says the screen has gone through multiple design iterations from last year, in an effort to improve this.

The Paperwhite has three key new features: Page Flip, In-Line Footnotes, and Vocabulary Builder.

Page Flip lets you skip around without losing your place. In-Line Footnotes lets you view a footnote from the page you’re on in a pop-up window, instead of being catapulted to another part of the book. In-Line Footnotes worked with only some of the books I read. Vocabulary Builder, which appears in a drop-down menu from the settings tab, shows you flashcards for all the words you’ve searched for while reading.

When you fire up the Kindle, you see a row of options at the top of the screen, including home, back, lighting adjustment, settings and a shopping cart that takes you to the Amazon store. Amazon has around two million e-books available for download on Kindle, including 400,000 that are exclusive to the Kindle store.

If you’re an Amazon Prime subscriber, you can also borrow a fraction of those e-books. Three out of roughly a dozen books I’ve searched for weren’t available on Amazon.com as a Kindle download—though some of them were older and not especially popular books.

Once I started reading I could see the difference between my older Paperwhite and the new one. My old Paperwhite has a strange shadow at the bottom of the display and in general the glowing screen can have a sort of uneven look. The new one looks brighter, the black and white contrast is greater and there are no shadows.

The new Paperwhite has a faster processor. I noticed its speediness more when toggling through the icons at the top of the screen—tapping the home button, searching, going into settings—because everything just felt more responsive. I didn’t notice it quite as much with page turns. Books also downloaded very quickly.

The new Paperwhite costs $ 119 for a Wi-Fi-only version with “special offers,” which basically means Amazon runs ads across the lock screen. Then the price jumps up to $ 189 for the Wi-Fi and 3G version with special offers. Add $ 20 to both prices if you want to strip away the special offers.

The Paperwhite comes with two gigabytes of internal storage, storing around 1,000 books. The device has just a power button, a status light and a micro-USB port for charging.

The good news about the new Paperwhite is that its battery matches the battery of the old Paperwhite, even while running on a more powerful processor. Amazon says it can last up to two months with Wi-Fi turned off. After five nights of using the Kindle Paperwhite with Wi-Fi turned on, my battery had only dwindled to approximately 70%.

The bad news is Amazon still isn’t throwing in a power adapter for wall outlets, which means you could spend $ 15 extra on that.

Also, the Paperwhite doesn’t have a headphone jack, and it doesn’t support audio books through Audible. The “experimental browser” still feels like an experiment.

Also, and this is a small thing, but I really like that notes are auto-corrected when you’re using the Kindle app for iPad. Conversely, on the Kindle e-reading devices, text isn’t auto-corrected, which means I’m fat-fingering all sorts of words that probably won’t make sense to me later on.

These downsides aside, the new Kindle Paperwhite is a welcome improvement in the Kindle line.

Write to Lauren Goode at