Amazon reveals KiddieKindle and pocket money scheme

Amazon.com looks to have decided that its next big market is your kids.

The company's unveiled a “Kindle for Kids Bundle” that takes a normal 6” Kindle, wraps it in a bit of coloured plastic and bundles a two-year warranty for the device. That warranty applies to “common accidents, including knocking it off a table, dropping it in water, or your dog chewing on it” in addition to malfunctions. The KiddieKindle also gamifies reading, letting kids set daily reading goals and allowing them to tally the number of tomes they've completed. The Kindle's inbuilt dictionary gets a tweak to become a “vocabulary builder” so that when you kids look up wirds werds whords words they build their own dictionary.

Amazon's saying that “It's not screen time, it's book time” and pointing out that “unlike tablets, Kindle is designed just for reading” to distinguish a Kindle from something that can play Minecraft and destroy your child's brain.

At US$99 you're paying a $20 premium for the KiddieKindle.

The offer talks up the fact that some public libraries lend Kindle books and also kindly points out that Amazon sells lots of books. It omits the fact that last week Amazon also started a pocket money/allowance service. The idea's pretty simple: parents or guardians of those aged 13 to 17 can set up automatic credit card debits that appear as credit in their kids'a Amazon accounts.

You give your child the gift of content, which expands their brain. And because it's Amazon credits, they can't blow the dough ingestible psychoactives.

The two offers are US-centric and come – surprise! - a few weeks before the US summer holidays commence.

All of which means US-based readers now have the option of letting Uncle Jeff (Bezos) take care of the kids this summer. Don't let 'em download anything too raunchy, Uncle Jeff! ®