Kindle Paperwhite Voyage
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos revealed an 8th generation Kindle announcement is coming next week. Pictured are the Kindle Voyage (front) and the Paperwhite. Amazon.com Inc.

Amazon.com Inc. unveiled a slew of new products Thursday, including a tablet for under $100 and an e-reader for as high as $289, called the Kindle Voyage. The high-end successor to the Paperwhite line is Amazon’s clearest yet, and its thinnest.

The Kindle Voyage has a built-in light like the one found on the earlier Paperwhite models, and the sharpest screen of any e-reader on the market: 300 pixels per inch (ppi) on a 6-inch display. Amazon will continue to sell the Paperwhite alongside a basic model new for 2014, a $79 Kindle with a lower, 167ppi resolution that lacks a backlight.

Amazon taught the newest Kindle e-reader a couple of neat tricks, including to turn pages without the user touching the screen, and the ability to adjust its brightness based on surrounding light with a built-in sensor. Earlier Kindle models had buttons on either side of the screen for turning the page, while the Kindle Paperwhites required a swipe on their touchscreens.

The new technology, which Amazon calls PagePress, is a pressure-sensitive area on the Kindle Voyage that you squeeze to move through a book. It gives a slight vibration, or haptic feedback, to let you know it has registered your touch.

Amazon Fire HD Kids Edition
Amazon announced the Kindle Voyage alongside new 6- and 7-inch Fire HD tablets, a lower end e-reader and the Fire HD Kids Edition, which the retailer promises to replace if breaks. Amazon.com Inc.

The arrival of Amazon’s Kindle Voyage e-reader, which shows no colors and costs as much as $289, alongside a $99 6-inch tablet and another made for kids that Amazon promises to replace if it breaks, shows the e-commerce giant attempting to squeeze the most out of product niches around Apple Inc.’s popular tablet, the iPad.

The company also announced a lower-cost alternative to Apple Inc.’s iPad Air (starts at $499) the 2014 Kindle Fire HDX, a 8.9-inch tablet that ranges from $379 to $494. Apple itself is expected to unveil a new iPad sometime next month.