Amazon’s Fire HD 8 Reader’s Edition Ships Tomorrow

Amazon on Monday launched the Reader’s Edition of its Fire HD 8. Users can get their hands on the device along with a year of Kindle Unlimited with access to over 1 million books, and a limited edition leather cover for only $249.99. It is now available for pre-order and will ship on December 9.

The 8-inch tablet is one of Amazon’s thinnest tablets ever (7.7mm) and supports 1280 x 800 HD display with over 1 million pixels. It is equipped with a powerful quad-core processor, a 720p front-facing camera and a 5MP rear-facing camera with 1080p HD video, up to 128GB of expandable storage via microSD, and all-day battery life.

“Fire HD 8 Reader’s Edition simply delivers the best reading experience on any tablet,” said Charlie Tritschler, Vice President, Amazon Devices. “With an incredibly thin and light design and 8” HD color display, this is the perfect tablet for reading—a year of Kindle Unlimited with access to over a million books, plus innovative new features like Blue Shade—now even more readers can curl up in bed with their favorite stories.”

With a year of Kindle Unlimited, users will be able to read freely from top books, including The Man in the High Castle, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, the entire Harry Potter series, and many more. Amazon said the service costs $9.99 per month but is included for one year with Reader’s Edition (a $120 value).

The Blue Shade feature that Tritschler referred to is an innovative new feature that adjusts and optimizes the display to reduce blue light exposure before bedtime. It also offers warm color filters and the ability to lower the display brightness to an ultra-low level for comfortable nighttime reading—even in a dark room.

In addition, the tablet aims to greatly enhance reading experience for users by a variety of features including bookerly font, adjustable font, Multi-colored highlights, Word Runner, immersion reading, Kindle sharing with instant previews, Goodreads integration and much more.

“Fire HD also offers deep integration of Amazon-exclusive services, access to over 38 million movies, TV shows, songs, books, magazines, apps and games, and much more—plus free, unlimited cloud storage for all Amazon content”, the press release said.