Is the Kindle Worth It?

I’ve been using my Kindle for about four or five years, and these days the only real proof that I ever owned one is my Amazon account and whatever files I still have stored on it.

If you’re curious, feel free to send me a private message… but let’s get into the actual usage experience…

For an individual, if you have plenty of free time and don’t really need to annotate books heavily, then choosing a Kindle as a reader for novels, magazines, and short stories is a very solid option. It can even handle certain study materials—especially ones where only light annotations are required—and the reading experience feels fairly close to that of a real paperback or hardcover.

I personally used a Kindle for four or five years, but after graduation I stopped using it much. Digging it out became too much hassle compared with just picking up my phone, and since most of my work communications ran through WeChat, I was practically glued to my phone anyway. So I ended up passing the Kindle down to my younger brother, where it basically gathered dust.

Before graduation, during my university days, I did use my Kindle regularly—mostly for Zhihu Weekly, Zhihu e-books, and very rarely for anything that demanded heavy note-taking or marginalia. For highly academic or serious nonfiction titles, I find a Kindle quite inadequate for real study needs; frankly, even many other e-readers struggle with that kind of workload.

After graduation, my actual study needs drove me right back to paper books. The biggest advantage is that physical copies let you flip quickly forward and backward, locate your notes in seconds, and organize important passages with ease. That’s pretty clunky on a Kindle—at least for me, it’s a dealbreaker.

All in all, from a personal standpoint, the Kindle’s real niche is as a dedicated reader for magazines, e-books, and portable library access. It isn’t well suited to serious studying, though—aside from one exception: learning English through Kindle’s built-in dictionary alongside English-language texts works surprisingly well. Sadly I can’t screenshot that anymore since I gave the device away.

Also, if you truly have spare time and are actually going to put the Kindle to use, my advice is: skip the expensive premium models and go for the base model. Why?

Because most people aren’t sure when they’ll stop using it and let it sit idle. For the majority, the “enthusiastic first month” phase lasts no more than three months—sometimes less. After that, it’s basically just proof that you once read a book.

So buy the entry-level version, try it out, and see. In my view, the only real downside is the lack of a backlit screen, which means you can’t comfortably read at night—but let’s be honest: what do most people do at night anyway? Binge shows, play games, scroll their phones, or sleep?

What matters more is that if you buy the base model and it turns out not to be for you, reselling it only stings a little. You can usually fetch 350–400 RMB on the secondhand market, whereas premium models drop by half their price. That really hurts, won’t it?

For folks living frugally like me, the rule is simple: either get your money’s worth out of it, or cut costs wherever possible. Don’t let elite consumerism trap you!

Of course, if you still want to splurge on a high-end model, go ahead—I won’t stop you. It doesn’t cost me anything either way.

If your main reason for buying a Kindle is just to save money on physical books, you might as well forget the Kindle altogether and switch to apps like WeChat Read or Snail Reading instead. Their libraries are just as comprehensive, and the various promotions and discounts will help you grab content cheaply—or even for free.

Pairing a Kindle with free online e-books does cut costs and delivers a reading experience fairly close to that of print, but it still falls short of what you get from a physical book when it comes to actual studying. That said, using the e-ink version of WeChat Read is a perfectly viable alternative.

To sum up: if a book is heavily study-oriented—especially instructional guides rather than narrative fiction—I wouldn’t recommend a Kindle; a physical book is a better call. But if you’re reading purely for pleasure, a Kindle works great.

I’d recommend the entry-level model, not the premium one. The trial-and-error cost is too high, and honestly, the day-to-day experience isn’t that much better in my opinion.

Lastly, here are a few titles I’d like to recommend to whoever stumbles across this answer—hope they prove useful in your own lives: