Well, what an interesting thread! I do love my Kindle Keyboard but the ads drove me up the wall. Must be getting old.
It costs $50.00 to get rid of the ads on a Kindle Keyboard (comes with wi-fi and 3G) - $139.00 with ads and $189.00 NOT to have them. Amazon recommends buying the one with the ads - of course - and claims they are unobtrusive. Hmmm....
I didn't mind the ads for books but when they started sending me ads for routers and other products, I'd had enough. I did actually buy a router but not from Amazon. According to Amazon and the independent? reviews I read, most people don't mind the ads as they only appear in the wallpapers that come up when the Kindle is turned off but why should we have to pay NOT to have ads in the first place? After about a week of them, I confess that I did pay them to leave me alone. Pay money and the ads are gone in less than five minutes. Sounds kind of like racketeering doesn't it?
The simplest (and cheapest) way to turn the ads off is to disable wi-fi which is very easy to do via the menu. However, any ads that are already on the Kindle will continue to annoy you. You don't need wi-fi to read books - just to download them unless you have 3G or 4G available and your Kindle supports either of them. You could also download the books to your PC if you prefer but since Amazon tracks everything you do, I think downloading them directly to the Kindle is better than giving them access to a PC - not that I am paranoid.
After running a search on the internet, I did find a way to remove all of the ads from my Kindle using a simple hack and they do stay off as long as wi-fi is disabled but...then it whines that it needs you to enable wi-fi so it can download its ads! Aaaaaahhhhhh! Seems to me that allowing ads should be a voluntary opt-in that provides users with some sort of compensation instead of forcing us to opt-out by paying them more money. These days I am not sure who to be more concerned about - Amazon or Google!