A new Kindle runs less than $100 in the US (it's largely subsidised by Amazon, they want you to buy books). You can find used models for as little as $20 on Craigslist currently.
Other eBook readers from firms such as Kobo or Onyx start at about $100 to $200, and again may be found used for a small fraction of that price.
That's still a hurdle, but roughly the cost of a new trade-paper volume with the capability to hold many hundreds or thousands of books.
Depending on what you're looking for, there are ebooks which can be found, legally, free of charge from sources such as Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, the Internet Archive (both to check out or to download with no limitations), and other libraries. The US Library of Congress has been expanding its own offerings (I'm not up on the latest, though am given to understand it's generous), and many large-city libraries (Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Kansas City, etc.) have extensive digital lending programmes.
That's without leaning on book liberation sites such as ZLib, LibGen, or Anna's Archive, though those have quite extensive holdings.