Here’s some frustrating news for authors and industry freelancers. It seems Godaddy has seen fit to turn off the lights on one of its website builders, Virb. According to several sources, Virb shut down without notifying users nor giving them a chance to move their sites or even download a copy of their sites.

Edit: The Wayback Machine shows that the Virb home page got its current EOL message some time between 14 June and 28 June.

The sites are just gone:

https://twitter.com/JayShapiro3/status/1281355020668071941

I could say a lot about how Godaddy screwed up here, but that won’t get your website up and running again.

That’s going to take some work; you’ll need to find a new host for your site, get a copy of your content, and set up the new site.

I can help you take care of this, but I will also give you the basic steps so you can DIY.

Here’s how you can do that.

1. Find a Web Host

We’re operating under the clock, so I am going to point you to two possible hosting companies. If you want to build a WordPress site, you should get an account with Siteground. If you want a pagebuilder service service similar to Virb, you should choose Squarespace.

• Squarespace – There are many services like Virb, and Squarespace is the easiest to use and has the prettiest themes. I have worked with several different pagebuilder services like Virb, and Squarespace is literally the only service of this type that I would recommend.
• Siteground – There are many companies that can host your WordPress site (even me).  Siteground is not the cheapest but it does have best tech support and customer service. (Well, I am better but then again I try harder.)

2. Get a copy of your content

If you don’t have a backup of your site, you might be able to recover the content by visiting the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The IA has been backing up the web for a couple decades now, and there’s a good chance that they scanned your site at some point.

If you find your site there, bookmark the link so you can find it again.

3. Set up the new site

If you have a backup copy of your site, I could get it online in an afternoon. But if you don’t it will take a little longer.

What you will need to do next is decide if you want to design a new site or recreate your old site using a new website design and the content you found on the Wayback Machine.  If you choose the former then it will take longer but you will end up with a refreshed website that will look better than before. But if you just want to get your site up fast, the quick option is to simply remake what you had before.

A new site will involve either designing it yourself or hiring a designer to build it for you. Recreating your old site will involve finding a similar website theme, and then copying and pasting your content from the Wayback machine to the new theme, one page at a time.

The choice is up to you.

But no matter which choice you make, I can help.

image by Steve Snodgrass via Flickr

I was just reading over at MobileRead that Amazon has finally removed the Active Content section of the Kindle Store.

AC is the clunky name that Amazon gave to the apps that were developed to run on Kindle, Kindle Touch, and Kindle Paperwhite. At one point it included over 490 games, tools, crosswords, test prep apps, and even choose your own adventure type books such as Dusk World (or Coliloquy’s apps).

The image below shows a "where’s waldo" type of game running on my old Kindle Touch.

The feature launched in 2010/2011, and was essentially abandoned by 2014 when Amazon launched the Kindle Voyage. Amazon decided to not support Active Content on its then newest ereader. Later Kindle models also lacked support for Active Content, and that meant it was only a matter of time before Amazon also removed the section from the Kindle Store.

And now one of the last remaining holdovers from that crazy time when ebooks were new is now gone.

There was a time, back in the early ebook era, when everyone was throwing really cool ideas up against the wall to see what stuck. Enhanced ebooks, for example, got tried a dozen times in around 7 years, and failed to find a market every time. Augmented reality ebooks was also tried several times, and for the most part failed because the tech wasn’t there (AR was always going to be a niche product, but it’s time will come).

Digital textbooks were tried and failed several times because students could see they didn’t make economic sense, but then publishers found a way to force them down students' throats (site licenses). And multiple different ereaders were tried, including two-screen models such as the Entourage Edge and the Kno (many of which are dead now).

And now Kindle Active Content is joining all the other formerly great ideas in the ebook graveyard.

RIP

Amazon has a great reading platform in the Kindle, but sometimes it’s not enough.

Sometimes I need to take the notes I make in a Kindle ebook and use them elsewhere. Amazon doesn’t make it easy for us to do that, but luckily there are other ways.

Back in 2015 I needed to export my Kindle notes, so I did some digging and rounded up a few tools which would help me do just that. The tools range from the simple (copy+paste from a web browser) to the inaccessible (an iPhone app and a Mac-only script).

Now it’s March 2019, and about half the tools mentioned in the original post are gone. So I have updated the post with corrected info and I’ve also pruned the tools that have died in the past four years.

Edit: And now it’s June 2020, and I still need to export my notes, so I have revised this post.

The available tools have changed a lot over the years. For example, Amazon used to have a site called Kindle.Amazon.com where you could find your note and highlights, see what other people were writing in the margins, etc. Unfortunately, that is gone now. (That page was sorta replaced by Read.amazon.com, but the new page doesn’t have the same features.)

So let’s start with the simple trick that still works.

Look in the documents folder of your E-ink Kindle and you’ll see a file named myclippings.txt. This is a text file of all of the notes and highlights made on your Kindle (but not on the other Kindles or Kindle apps on your account). You can copy this file to your PC and open it.

Boom. You can now copy and past your notes into other documents, emails, etc.

Kindle (devcies)

Did you know you can have your Kindle Paperwhite, Kindle Oasis, or Kindle email your annotations to you? (I didn’t until Tom told me.) Amazon will email the notes and highlights to the address on your Amazon account. They will arrive as a PDF and a CSV attached to the email.

You can access the export option from the Notes menu which can be found in the 3 dot menu dropdown inside the ebook you’re reading.

iPad, Android, Kindle Fire

The Kindle apps for iOS and Android have a feature which is shared by the Kindle Fire tablets. They have a notebook menu where you can find all of the highlights and notes for an ebook.

This menu is accessible from inside the ebook, and one of the things you’ll find there is an option to share your annotations by email. Here’s what it looks like on the iPad:

The notebook menu can be accessed from inside a book, but the way you find it differs between Android, iOS, and the Kindle Fire.

On iOS, click the “sheet of paper” icon in the upper right corner. The export button is in the upper right corner of the notebook menu. The exported notes don’t look very good, but this trick does let you pull the notes out of even a side-loaded ebook.

On Android, click the "3 dots" icon in the upper right corner, and then select the Notebook option from the dropdown menu. You can either create flashcards or export the notes to Drive, by email, or by Android Beam.

On the Kindle Fire, open the ebook and press the center of the screen. One of the icons you will see across the top of the screen will look like a piece of paper. That is the notebook menu, and the export option is in the upper right corner.

Kindle Cloud Reader

Amazon’s Kindle app for the web browser is located at Read.amazon.com, and it even has a copy of your notes at Read.amazon.com/notebook.

I just heard that it actually does have an export option., but you have to get Amazon CS to enable the feature first.

Kindle for PC

I forgot to include this in the original post, but the Kindle app for Windows and macOS has a notebook feature just like the one in the Kindle apps for Android and iOS. Its only export option is an HTML file. This is not an ideal option, but it does exist, which is better than nothing.

This screenshot should help you find the export feature.

Bookcision

This nifty little bookmarklet is simple and works great with Chrome. After you install it, you use it by opening an ebook’s highlights page on Read.amazon.com and then clicking the bookmarklet button.

I liked Bookcision because it worked well with Chrome. With other web browsers, you can save the notes to the clipboard, but with Chrome I also get multiple download options (text, XML, JSON). The latter two options include a link to the note’s location in the ebook.

Evernote WebClipper

This tool can be used to copy part of a page or an entire webpage into your Evernote account, and I’m told it works well to copy notes from a book’s highlights page on Read.amazon.com.

But you might want to manually select the book notes though and copy and paste.  There’s one report that the page has an infinite scroll built-in that messes up one user’s Evernote clipper.

And while we’re on the topic, Microsoft’s OneNote has a similar clipping tool. It takes screenshots so it’s not nearly as useful, but if you already use that platform then it’s worth a look.

Clippings.io

Here’s another service I’m not sure I can recommend.

Clippings.io is supposed to offer an easy to use online service for managing your Kindle notes and highlights, but I haven’t found a good reason to continue using it.

While I was setting it up, I noticed that this "free" service works with a Chrome plugin which costs $2 (you can also find the myclippings.txt file and upload it). That turned me off, and since it basically duplicates activities I already perform on my PC, I plan to close the tab and forget about it.

Calibre

And last but not least, calibre. This ebook library tool can not only send ebooks to your Kindle, it can also fetch the annotations from a Kindle – only there’s a catch.

This only works when you have your Kindle plugged into your PC over USB.  And it apparently doesn’t work for newer Kindles.

I found this trick while researching this post, and I also found a bug report which says that this feature doesn’t work with newer Kindles. I can’t get it to work with my Paperwhites, for example.

But since it might work for you, I’m including it here. Head on over to JetShred for instructions and more details.

Conclusion

All in all, there are a lot of tools out there that either don’t work, aren’t terribly useful, or are intended to work in only specific circumstances.

But I found at least one tool that I like, so I’m good.

Did you find one you could use? Did I miss one?

The comments are open.

image by Terry Madeley via Flickr

The pandemic has many questioning whether brick-and-mortar retail will ever return to normal. Some might wait for an answer before investing in new physical retail locations, but not Amazon. The retailer continues to launch new Amazon Books locations at, compared to its competitors, a breakneck speed.

Amazon opened its first bookstore in November 2015 in Seattle, and since then they have announced, launched, or started developing 24 additional locations, including launching a store in Phoenix, AZ just over 2 weeks after the first Amazon Books location’s 4th anniversary, and filing for permits for a store in Kansas City, MO, in May 2020 (in the middle of a raging pandemic, yes). The stores carry a selection of several thousand books as well as toys, games, electronics, and Amazon hardware such as the Kindle ereader and the Echo smart speaker.

For a while there it looked like Amazon was cooling to the idea of physical bookstores; in 2018 they canceled two bookstores and converted a third location into a 4-Star store. That period of uncertainty lasted only a few months, however, with Amazon opening  its next bookstore in Denver in March 2019.

Amazon has continued to open bookstores since then, and they have also started renovating older stores. In late 2019 Amazon temporarily shut down the Georgetown, Bethesda, and three other Amazon Books locations so they could refit the stores with electronic shelf labels, shift the books so they were shelved spine out, and reorganize the store layouts.

In spite of Amazon’s continued expansion, the retailer has faced less and less criticism as time passed. For the first year or so the announcement of each new Amazon Books location drew complaints from local booksellers, and after the first location opened in Seattle, the ABA started muttering about violations of antitrust law, although this ultimately proved unfounded.

Very little has been written about Amazon’s bookstores in the past few years, and yet at the same time Amazon has managed to become the fifth largest bookstore chain in the US after B&N, BAM!, Half-Price Books, and Deseret Books. (This list does not include Hudson News, which operates airport bookstores, or Follett or B&N Edu, which operate college bookstores.)

To be honest, this achievement isn’t as impressive as it would have been three or four years ago. A number of chains have failed in the past few years, including Lifeway, Book World, Hastings, and Family Christian Stores. Each of these chains had more stores than Amazon Books, but they did not have the sales to keep the stores open.

Amazon does, or so we assume. The retailer has not revealed revenue figures for their stores, leaving us no option other than to speculate.

At the very least we can conclude that Amazon is getting something of value out of their bookstore chain. Is it sales data? Tax write offs?

Your guess is as good as mine.

image by Rob Young via Flickr

If you are looking for something new to read, Amazon just announced its list of the best books of 2020.

1. The Girl with the Louding Voice: A Novel by Abi Daré: In this rousing tale of courage and pluck, a 14-year-old Nigerian girl is sold into servitude by her father when her mother—a proponent of education—passes away. You will root for Adunni as she endeavors to escape her sorry—and often harrowing—lot, and applaud the kind strangers who buoy her efforts and her spirits.
2. Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker: Hidden Valley Road is a heartbreaking, expertly told story of an all-American family, the Galvins, six of whom were diagnosed with schizophrenia while still teenagers. Relying on exhaustive research, Kolker weaves together cultural, medical, and family history to show the ravages of mental illness on the six Galvin boys, on their parents, and, perhaps most movingly, on their other six siblings.
3. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes: A Hunger Games Novel by Suzanne Collins: The 10th anniversary of the Hunger Games is beginning, and 18-year-old Coriolanus Snow—President Snow, when we met him decades later in The Hunger Games—has an important role to play. Nearly impossible to put down, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is an exciting and thought-provoking novel that goes outside the arena to ask interesting questions about human nature and ambition.
4. Deacon King Kong: A Novel by James McBride: Set in the 1960s, this propulsive and darkly comic neighborhood epic features a cast of characters that are beguiling, boozed-filled, and larger than life. National Book Award-winner McBride weaves a fictional story of one Brooklyn project, but in doing so tells a broader tale of race and religion, getting by and getting out, and how grudges and alliances become embedded in the foundations of our lives.
5. Pretty Things: A Novel by Janelle Brown: When a second-generation grifter, Nina, and her shady boyfriend move to Lake Tahoe, they collide with a woman from Nina’s past, heiress Vanessa Liebling. Behind a glittering façade of old money and fast living, a darker story of social climbing, social media, revenge, and betrayal starts to take menacing shape. 
6. Writers & Lovers: A Novel by Lily King: Writers & Lovers is about the uncertainty of relationships, and of pursuing the creative life, in a world that values success and stability. Life is not waiting for Casey to fulfill her dream of being a novelist, so she works as a waitress and she dates, and she tries to figure it out as she goes. Love and art require frequent, often imperceptible, leaps of faith—and this book captures that perfectly.
7. Sigh, Gone: A Misfit’s Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In by Phuc Tran: Sigh, Gone is one of the funniest and most profound memoirs of the year so far. Without rose-colored glasses and with a flair for humor, Tran recounts his childhood as a Vietnamese kid growing up in a small Pennsylvania town: the racism, dislocation, and violence that surrounded him, how he fought to fit in, and how he fell in love with literature.
8. The City We Became: A Novel by N. K. Jemisin: Five strangers unexpectedly become the living embodiments of New York City’s boroughs and must battle an evil entity that threatens the city. Jemisin infuses this live-wire love letter to the city’s diverse denizens with reality-ripping storytelling.
9. Oona Out of Order: A Novel by Margarita Montimore: Oona Lockhart is celebrating New Year’s Eve 1982 and the eve of her 19th birthday, but at midnight she passes out and wakes up as a 19-year-old trapped in the body of a 51-year-old. Thus begins Oona living life out of order. Although Oona Out of Order could be a fun romp through the adage “youth is wasted on the young” (and it is), it’s also a deeper look at destiny, love, and family.
10. The Mercies: A Novel by Kiran Millwood Hargrave: There isn’t much that is not unforgiving when it comes to the far-flung and frigid town of Vardø, Norway, including the sea that surrounds it, which swallows the majority of its male population in an epic storm while they’re fishing. Accusations of witchcraft quickly infect this grieving but resourceful community, threatening what hard-won normalcy they’ve regained. The Mercies is infuriating, baleful, but full of stubborn hope.

image by david.orban via Flickr

Overdrive just announced they are "buying" part of RBmedia RBdigital, although given that both companies are owned by KKR, this is really more of a reorganization than an acquisition.

 OverDrive is acquiring the assets of RBmedia’s library business, including the RBdigital platform in North America, the United Kingdom and Australia.

The acquisition of RBdigital will bring enhanced content and features to the OverDrive platform, enabling it to better serve the needs of libraries around the world, including access to new release Recorded Books audiobooks. Moreover, OverDrive will be exploring the addition of popular RBdigital services like digital magazines from ZINIO to the OverDrive platform. As the owner of both RBmedia and OverDrive, KKR is uniquely positioned to facilitate this transaction and help bring libraries the best solutions possible.

"Combining the RBdigital library business with OverDrive’s industry-leading technologies will greatly benefit libraries and their readers worldwide," said Steve Potash, founder and CEO of OverDrive. "We’re proud to enhance our value proposition for libraries by delighting readers with this new content on the award-winning Libby and Sora reading apps."

Basically what this deal means is that RBmedia RBdigital will continue to be a distributor for the consumer market, while OverDdrive will serve the library market. There’s no word yet on how this will affect Overdrive’s whitelabel retail ebookstore platform, but there doesn’t appear to be any conflict  or overlap with RBmedia RBdigital, so there’s no reason they cannot coexist.

KKR bought RBmedia RBdigital in late 2018, and bought Overdrive in late 2019.

image by JuliaC2006 via Flickr

A picture is worth a thousand words, and nowhere is that more true than social media.

Choosing the right photo to share or having an eye-catching header graphic is how you get noticed. Those images have to be formatted correctly, but unfortunately the optimal image sizes change over time as each social network tweaks their platform.  We need to stay on top of these details, otherwise a brilliant meme could get its punchline cut off.

The following infographic from Constant Contact covers the standard image dimensions for the six major social networks,  including Pinterest and Twitter. Check it and see if the graphic you make are still the right size.

Constant Contact

Fastpencil sent out an email yesterday, informing us that it was re-branding as Opyrus.

We are very excited to announce that FastPencil, a leading all-in-one solution for creating, distributing and selling print and eBooks, is rebranding our company. We do this to better reflect our vision and enhance our position, so we may provide a more compelling offering for our writers and authors.

Introducing Opyrus, an online, self-betterment platform for writers and authors. Our goal is to inspire, guide and enable people to tap into their power to write, become better authors and to make a positive impact on people’s lives.

For those not familiar with the name, Fastpencil/Opyrus is a competitor to Bookbaby and Lulu. They are a comprehensive service provider. I have never used them, however, so I can’t comment on their services.

BTW, they are holding a raffle to celebrate the re-branding. You can enter here to win a Kindle, Audible subscription, a Dragon license, and more!

The publishing services provider Lulu has been in something of a tizzy these past few months. The company updated its platform on April as part of launching its new services marketplace, and things did not turn out as planned.

There hasn’t been much discussion in the FB groups or author forums I frequent (I actually heard about this third-hand) but apparently the update broke, basically everything. Multiple authors have reported:

• lost sales,
• lost books,
• lost covers,
• lost projects, and
• lost accounts.

Lulu informed authors on its FB page on 12 June that the issues are being fixed on an ongoing basis, and also telling authors that all revenue since the end of April has been reported. What is especially scary about that is that there are authors who have recorded no sales since the April update, so it would appear that they have had no sales through Lulu for the past couple months.

Lulu also posted a link to a Google form you can use to submit support tickets for the more common problems, including:

• missing or incorrect cover thumbnails,
• missing projects,
• unable to download files,
• unable to Add to Cart, or
• previously approved projects incorrectly requiring proof purchase.

I know I have a well-earned reputation for being melodramatic but I do not think I am exaggerating too much when I say that this looks to be the worst system update since the PennCentral merger.

If you are one of the authors or publishers who was affected by the borked update, now might be a good time to to locate the exit.

When B&N was acquired by a venture capital firm last year, and James Daunt named CEO, many feared that he would shutter B&N struggling digital division. Daunt was seen as anti-ebook, after all, and Waterstones ebook sales certainly did not thrive under his leadership (in fact, since Waterstones' Overdrive-powered ebookstore was closed way back in 2016, the bookseller had no ebook sales).

I had been wondering if B&N would even bother to  ship another Nook model, or just make my April Fools Day joke come true, and now it would appear we have an answer.

The Bookseller published an interview of Daunt on Friday where he said:

He also referenced the US e-book operation  Nook, part of Barnes & Noble. “Evidently it has been helped by the pandemic, but things have turned around for Nook. The perception that I am anti-e-books is wrong. I am very in favour of them if I can sell them, and I have not been able to do that [in the UK]. One of the things where I differ from my immediate predecessor at B&N is that I consider the ability to sell e-books to be a great strength, and the company had stopped investing in Nook. That will change. We will make Nook very much part of what we do [in the US].”

He said questions about selling e-books in the UK had been parked during the coronavirus crisis, but added that it would be looked at again. “I wouldn’t hold your breath, but all other things being equal, it is something we should aspire to do. We sell an awful lot of e-books in the US.”

I know that Mark Williams has made a big deal about Daunt supposedly rewriting history about his being anti-ebook, and I think Williams is mistaken.

The problem with labeling Daunt as anti-ebook is that it lumps him in the same group with the major US trade publishers. The Big Five actively sabotaged their ebook sales, and even engaged in a conspiracy to to rig ebook prices, but Daunt has never engaged in any action showing that degree of hostility to ebooks.

I would instead say that Daunt was really good at selling print books, and really into the print book buying experience. I would say based on his public statements that it’s not that he hated ebooks so much as he knew how to sell print books, and could grow a business built on physical bookstores, while ebooks required a different bag of tricks.

To give you an analogy, folks, I do not know how to play a cello, but that doesn’t make me anti-cello. It just means I am doing other things. The same applies to Daunt.

That said, we live in a post pandemic world. Retail is going to change radically in the next few years, and Daunt’s new opinion on ebooks reflects that fact that he is building a new business in a new era, one in which ebooks will likely be more important than they were this time last year.

Amazon has quietly released a couple new color options for the Kindle Paperwhite.

When the latest Kindle model shipped in late 2018, it was only available in black (the previous model was available in black and white). Then Amazon added a blue color option last summer, and now Amazon is offering two more color options: sage and plum.

It is almost as if Amazon has run out of new features to add, and has decided to offer us new color options instead.

As you can see in the graphic from Amazon’s website, the color options only apply to the rear shell. The front of the Paperwhite has been kept black to increase the perceived whiteness of the screen.

Bit sage and plum are available with either the 8GB  or 32GB storage options; coincidentally, the blue is out of stock, and won’t ship for a couple week.

Amazon

I can’t beleive it – book publishers have given Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle exactly what he wanted.

Today the AAP announced that four US publishers – HarperCollins, Wiley, Hachette, and Penguin Random House – have filed suit against San Francisco-based Internet Archive.

Today, member companies of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Internet Archive (“IA”) in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The suit asks the Court to enjoin IA’s mass scanning, public display, and distribution of entire literary works, which it offers to the public at large through global-facing businesses coined “Open Library” and “National Emergency Library,” accessible at both openlibrary.org and archive.org. IA has brazenly reproduced some 1.3 million bootleg scans of print books, including recent works, commercial fiction and non-fiction, thrillers, and children’s books.

The publishers are suing because the Internet Archive is "lending" unlicensed copies of scanned books. It had been distributing the pirated works without limit since late March 2020 via the National Emergency Library, and they had been distributing in a more limited form since 2013 via The Open Library.

As I have previously explained, the IA has no legal defense for the National Emergency Library, and only an untested legal argument to defend the practices of The Open Library. (That untested legal argument is called CDL, and I wouldn’t put too much weight into it given that university libraries aren’t convinced it’s legal.)

The full complaint can be seen here.

I am a little surprised at this lawsuit. I have been waiting for almost two and a half years for publishers to sue over The Open Library (since it first really started getting attention), only to reach the tentative conclusion that publishers weren’t going to sue because they weren’t sure they could win in a legal fight where losing meant that copyright law would be rewritten.

While there is zero chance that the Internet Archive could win on the point of the National Emergency Library’s uncontrolled lending, the IA might still win a partial victory where CDL is found to be legal.

If you want to argue that CDL can’t possibly be legal, I would remind you that Google Books wasn’t legal – until, suddenly, it was. (I would also remind you that the ReDigi lost its case and still got a ruling that legalized the resale of music and other digital content.)

I had thought that publishers were avoiding testing CDL in court, but I guess National Emergency Library was too much for them, so four publishers have sued.

And that is exactly what Brewster Kahle wanted.

image by Mario A. P. via Flickr

It has been three years since Kobo launched its subscription ebook service Kobo Plus, and for all that time the service has been limited to Belgium and the Netherlands.

I am told that is about to change.

I am attending The Career Author Summit virtual conference this weekend, and I just heard Tara Cremlin of Kobo say that Kobo Plus will be launching in new territories. She did not give a timetable, but she did confirm the news in the chat.

Kobo Plus currently offers 270,000 ebooks and audiobooks for which can be read for 9.99 euro per month.

The service differs from Kindle Unlimited in that Kobo Plus does not require exclusivity, but like KU Kobo Plus does pay from a limited funding pool. If you would like to get your ebooks into Kobo Plus, you can do so via Kobo Writing Life, Draft2Digital, or Streetlib (and probably other distirbutors).

BTW, this might not be news to you, but it’s the first I have heard about it. Have you heard any rumors?

Amazon released its annual update to its Kindle Fire tablet line today. We got a new Kindle Fire HD 8, Kindle Fire HD 8 Plus, and a Kindle Fire HD 8 Kids Edition.

These tablets replace a model that shipped in 2018, but unlike that model, the new devices feature significant upgrades to the hardware.

The new tablets have a faster CPU than the last model (2GHz, vs 1.3GHz) and and a bump in RAM: the Kindle Fire HD 8 has 2GB RAM, while the Kindle Fire HD 8 Plus ships with 3GB.

Amazon is also boasting of a doubling of the storage (32GB and 64GB) and support for 1TB microSD cards. The new tablet also have longer battery life (12 hours, vs 10 hours).

The Kindle Fire HD 8 costs $89.

The Kindle Fire HD 8 Kids Edition, which is essentially the same as the Fire HD 8, only with a 2-year warranty, a case, and a year’s subscription to Kindle Freetime Unlimited, costs $139.

The Kindle Fire HD 8 Plus has more RAM, and it comes with a more powerful 9W charger. Even better, it also supports wireless charging (the dock is sold separately). And finally, Kindle Fire HD 8 Plus customers  get six months of Kindle Unlimited included with their tablet purchase.

The Kindle Fire HD 8 Plus costs $20 more, or $109.

While I am fine with the tablet I have, if I were looking for a new device I would probably go for the Kindle  Fire HD 8 Plus. I think the extra features are worth the extra $20 in price.