I already have a great portable e-book reader that's light enough to hold in my hand. It's my phone. And it's a sunk cost. Oh, and it's not locked to a single bookseller.

I spend all day reading text on screens; when it comes to recreational reading, why are my eyes suddenly so precious that they need a special display that's supposedly easy on them? Like, the rest of the day I'm beating them up or something? $500CAD is almost the up-front cost of a Nexus 6p. And when I get tired of reading Proust I can play Neko Atsume.

This is vesselmancy -- the same wayward urge that had fools plonking out for leatherbound copies of Encyclopedia Britannica as late as the '00s, when they could have -- should have -- known better.

The container has been abstracted. The value is not there anymore. Amazon is just doing arbitrage on the delayed response the background culture has to value migration. $60 leather case included indeed.