The textured plastic back is fairly easy to mark, but hides those marks relatively well. The back is simple textured hard plastic. Cranking up the brightness and leaving it hooked up to the internet all the time will reduce that quite a lot. I managed to get through two 270-page books between charges at various brightness levels and with wifi switched on occasionally to sync progress. As with other Kindles, this works just fine, but the basic Kindle only comes with 4GB of storage – fine for text ebooks, but don’t expect to fit too many audiobooks on it at any one time.īattery life is rated at 30 minutes of reading a day for four weeks with the light set to level 13 brightness and wireless off. It also has Bluetooth, designed for listening to audiobooks from Audible via wireless headphones or speakers. The Kindle 9 has wifi for syncing books, accessing the Kindle store and looking up information such as Wikipedia entries for unknown terms. Specificationsīattery life: rated for approximately 14 hours of reading It’s still not as good as dedicated page-turn buttons, but works fine even for one-handed reading. The Kindle also has an improved touchscreen, making accidental swipes and page turns slightly less likely. There’s no automatic brightness adjustment, as one might be used to on a phone, but adjusting the frontlight manually via the quick settings menu is trivial. It has fewer LEDs down the side, but works just as well, going from completely off to maximum brightness in 24 increments. Now you can read the basic Kindle in the dark. The big new addition for the Kindle 9 is an adjustable frontlight – the same technology that until recently was the differentiating factor of the more expensive Paperwhite. The frontlight augments the reading experience, whitening the screen so as dusk doesn’t slow you down.