Am I crazy or is a $100 kindle not “cheap”? It’s not like it’s a single-use product. I don’t understand the desire for a $8 e-reader, it’s effectively a one-time purchase (maybe once every 4-5 years at worst?).
Also I was very confused by the assertion that ebooks are a niche market. By the authors math more than 20% of people in the UK use e-readers to read on a regular basis. That seems like a very healthy market to me!
I'm not from the UK, and I'll admit my current reading habits are a sad excuse for what they were in my childhood and teens, so there might be some selection bias here.
I can say that out of the people I saw reading during my last beach vacation, almost all were using an e-Ink reader. They used to keep a small library of "beach books" you could read; that's gone. Casual readers have moved on to something else; people who read a lot have moved to e-Ink for outdoors.
But when you stick it next to a 10" Android tablet with an 8 core CPU, 12GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, full colour higher resolution screen, dual cameras and all that jazz, which is less than half the price of a black and white Kindle...suddenly it doesn't look so great.
Compare that to Android where you might be tempted to install Social Media Z app (I can't use X anymore :/) or your email/IM app. The distractions from that make it a sub-par reading device IMHO.
$60 for all that? I wonder how it runs in reality, and how well it'll run in just a year or two.
The thing about these dirt cheap tablets is... they're cheap for a reason, and it's not simply because that hardware is cheap these days. I've never once used, or had a family member bought, one of those super cheap tablets or laptops, and not have it be unusable in less than a year. They grind to a crawl, stop receiving updates, etc.
On the other hand, as many other comments here say... my Kindles are the absolute best value electronic device I've ever bought, no contest. I got one of the first generation Kindles, and only had to replace it a couple years ago after quite a few drops eventually broke the screen.
And yeah, it's probably a bit crap. And there's good odds that it'll be dead or broken or unsupported in a couple of years - although you could throw it away, buy a second one and still be cheaper than the Kindle was.
I certainly wouldn't buy one, and in the long run you may regret doing so. But it looks shinier than a Kindle, it has colour, it's far more responsive, and it has far more functionality. So when you stick the two side-by-side, the Kindle looks pretty overpriced by comparison. Just like how graphical calculators look horribly overpriced when you stick them next to a dirt cheap Android tablet that has 100x the functionality they do for less.
Also, usually they have extremely bad screens with terrible viewing angles. Using them as something you're going to stare at for hours is miserable. Sure, the spec list says it's a higher resolution than the paper-like e-reader, but in practice the paper like display is far more comfortable to stare at for long periods of time.
Spec lists don't tell the whole story.
IMO Kindles were best when they had hardware buttons so I have no interest in buying these new touchscreen ones.
I'm really surprised the cheapest one is $100 now, they used to have a little one for ~$50 that physical buttons on either side of the screen with the old non-paperwhite screen.