A few months ago, I received a Kindle for my birthday. Not the Kindle Touch or the Kindle Keyboard or the Kindle Fire. I asked for the base model with the directional keypad – partially because it was available immediately and I would have had to wait for the other versions, but mostly because I already have an iPhone and an iPad, and I wanted something to just read on. (It’s also much easier than the iPad to hold one-handed while balancing a newborn.)

The directional keypad doesn’t bother me at all. If anything, it makes me nostalgic of the devices I used growing up – especially when playing the free games (my favorites, if you’re interested, are Grid Detective and the Pixel Perfect collections). Typing sucks – hunt and peck taken to an extreme – but I hardly ever need to type. I usually buy all my books through the website anyway. The thing doesn’t need to be fancy, just get me to my books and get out of the way. (If you want an excellent in-depth review of the prominent eReaders out there, check out Marco Arment’s. Spoiler alert: he likes the basic Kindle the best too.)

Now I also just happened to get one of the Kindles with Special Offers. That’s the one I asked for; no need to spend an extra $30 to save a little screen real estate, and the ads aren’t there when you’re reading anyway. There have been articles like this one over at Lifehacker that detail how to get rid of the ads, but I don’t get why you’d need to. (I also don’t get why you wouldn’t just pony up the $30 and get rid of them for good – hacking the device can easily be reverted by Amazon down the road anyway, and karma’s a bitch.)

Here’s the kicker – I love the Special Offers. I know that “Special Offers” just means “Ads to Recoup the Cost of Giving You $30 Off Your Kindle”, but Amazon’s done something interesting here. The ads are usually pretty good deals. So far, in under 2 months, I’ve purchased a $30 Disney toy for my niece for $15, Richard Feynman’s “Surely Your Joking, Mr. Feynman!” for $1 (fun book, if you’re interested in the musings of a hilariously honest, down-to-earth, and prolific physicist), an excellent 49-song collection of classical pieces for $2, a Tom Clancy audiobook for free (hey, it was free), $5 off some of my Amazon Christmas shopping, and another random well-rated easy-read mystery novel for $1.

Amazon’s approach to ads won’t work for every business, but the Amazon folks nailed it for theirs.