Why I'm Not Trading In Any of My Old Kindles

In case you missed it, Amazon recently announced that they'll accept trade-ins of older Kindles. Visit this page to see how much yours might be worth. I've got a first-gen Kindle (yup, with the super-ugly design and keyboard) as well as two third-gen ones. I have no intention of sending any of them back. Not even the first-gen one with the weak battery.

Why? First of all, thanks very much to the glacial pace of change of the Kindle e-reading software, that first-gen device is every bit as useful as the latest one. Amazon never made functionality a compelling reason to upgrade; it's just always been about a sleeker design or a slightly faster device. As a result, all of the Kindles I own make for great hand-me-downs. When my Fire and Touch arrive next month I plan to give my third-gen Kindle to my son (just don't tell my daughters).

That leads to reason #2 I'm not taking part in the "great Kindle trade-in deal": Account sharing. All 3 of the Kindles in the Wikert family are on the same Amazon account. That means we buy a book once and can share it with each other. Yes, you have to be careful with Whispersync when you do this, but my wife and I have been sharing books all year with no problems. When I pass some of these older Kindles to my kids I'll keep them all on that same account so we can continue sharing books we only have to buy once.

Finally, the trade-in prices are awful. Seriously. $20 for the wifi Kindle I just bought earlier this year? No way. Again, even when the new generation ones hit next month I feel my current Kindle has way more value than $20. If Amazon really wants to make this program interesting though, they should consider giving all the trade-in Kindles to schools and other non-profits around the world. At least then we'd know the paltry trade-in credit we're receiving was for a good cause.