Go to tescos and try the kindles out. I got my son a basic fire, yep its a bit clunky and your locked into the amazon if i had the extra money I would have got the fire HD or the nexus. But for him its great, books, games, watches his videos on it, netflix, my plex server works on it.
what i like about it, its really easy to lock down with parental controls, and setting his own amazon account with no credit card assigned and I just load it with a gift card now and again.
not having the full google play store is a but of a bummer though, as some games he wants are not in the amazon one.