$80-100 is incredibly cheap for any mainstream tech device when you factor in design, manufacturing, marketing, shipping, software, support. eReaders are already sold at or below cost because companies are hoping that you will buy books to make up the difference. Wanting one for the price of a paperback so you can throw it away once you are done is absurd.
I got a Kindle Paperwhite for ~$100 in 2016 and still use it almost every day. Easily the best value gadget I have ever owned.
My son uses a Kindle DX. I had to replace the battery, it doesn't have WiFi, and they shut down the 3G network access years ago. It's perfect in that way. No distractions and no network access.
I removed the 3G modem when I replaced the battery to prevent it from being turned on and draining the battery as it constantly tries to connect. The microusb port is not in great condition and only works with the cable at certain angles. On the bright side, that's only an issue every few weeks when it gets charged and a new load of books.
My wife has the newest basic Kindle because she prizes light weight over any other aspect.
I think you're making the author's point. They cost the same 10+ years ago. They should be cheaper. And $100 is not chump change - but depends on where you live. Three day's salary for me (grad student)
I think we've passed the era of most new electronic devices constantly coming down in price due to time passing. They were all already mass produced commodities with competition at each step of the chain 10 years ago.
On whether $100 is incredibly cheap/"chump change": It really is incredibly cheap, especially for a new electronic device you can use for thousands of hours over 9 years. That's not the same as a claim it's an easy expense for every person, if we become bound by that definition of cheap then there is no such price which everyone can easily afford and we lose the distinction. On that note, I often wonder if it's cheaper for libraries to just rent out ereaders than manage more physical book storage and exchange. I know my local library already does rentals but I'm not sure of the economics.
I'm curious how much you think an e-reader should cost?
Let's say the BOM for a bargain-bin e-reader is ~$65: e-ink display (~$25), mainboard (~$15), touchscreen and/or buttons (~$7), radios (~$3), battery (~$3), case (~$3), assembly (~$6), packaging (~$3). Forget about a charging cable. Then you've got to iron out the drivers and software, provide support, handle returns (which will be higher if you cheap out on materials) and turn a profit (assuming you're not Amazon). Let's say you charge ~1.5x BOM, now your product is ~$98.
Maybe you "borrow" your software and hardware designs from a competitor. Maybe you're willing to continuously change your company name so you can purchase low-quality parts without having to accept returns. Maybe you ask suppliers for a discount because you just know you're going to have enormous economies of scale and you're somehow more convincing than every other company (that isn't Amazon) asking for the same discount.
You do all of the above so you can sell your new e-reader for the insanely low price of $80. Will you move enough units for all that to be worth it? Are there really that many customers who would buy your $80 no-name e-reader instead of a second-hand Kindle?
I bought a Kobo Glo HD for €129 in 2016. This would be €168 today.
A comparable entry-level model (Kobo Clara BW) today is €149 - 12% cheaper. It's also now waterproof and does bluetooth audio.
It's a niche product that doesn't really benefit much from economies of scale (think eInk displays of that size). I don't think anyone is getting ripped off here.
During that 10 years, inflation happened. Covid supply chain issues happened. Now, tariff uncertainty is happening. At the same time, the screen resolution of these devices has increased, the refresh rates have gotten faster, etc. Yes, even a "plain black and white" e-ink screen has slowly had tech improvements. So really, the price staying the same or going up a little is pretty expected. Most also have more other features now than 10 years ago.
For many of us in the USA $100 is the price of a meal for 2, no alcohol, at a good but not expensive "fine dining" type restaurant. The e-reader seems like a total steal in that context. (which of course doesn't mean that the pricing of things isn't psychotic)
Totally agree. I was given a Kindle Paperwhite as a gift (great gift idea, by the way) and eventually bought a Kobo for some more flexibility. Both were about $120 retail. It brought so much reading into my life - I'm a full ebook convert at this point. Few pieces of tech could give me so much value.
What do you use the extra flexibility for? I have a Kobo because I don't give money to Amazon. I wouldn't know what to do with it other than buy books from kobo.com and read them.
I agree. And the cost of ebooks is often very reasonable, Amazon are selling lots (more than one can read in a lifetime) of superb stuff in the $1-$4 range. (Makes things really difficult for the modern authors though).
Also a paper book you'd carry every day with you for a year will look in much worse state than a Kindle.
To be pedantic, Amazon sells you a license to read the book but you don’t actually own the book like you would a real book. They can remove the book anytime and there is nothing you can do about it. They’ve already done it in the past, the book just vanished.
I see this both ways; and the answer is obviously supply and demand, but it's not hard to think that the tech shouldn't be like 5 bucks a pop; e.g. if it became more popular to also use these as displays etc, in much the same way that big screen tvs are used to do menus at fast food places, etc.
Sadly I seem to have kindles which suffer from increasing numbers of stuck pixels after 3-5 years.
I think I'm on my third now, and while I kinda begrudge buying new ones the paper-white I've got now, with backlight, is such a pleasure to use I can almost forgive it.
Same here. €125 6 inch Kobo. Black and white screen with backlight and good resolution. USB-C. With WiFi off, battery lasts a month. Holds 1000's of books. Don't see why I'd need a new ereader for at least a decade to come.
Does the screen redraw faster on page turns? It’s the one thing that keeps me from using my old paperwhite very often. I would be willing to trade off considerable battery life for pages to turn instantly, which my iPad can do but I want e-ink.
I just got a R36s retro handheld console for 31€ (US$35) including a 64GB microSD and shipping from Aliexpress. Apparently sometimes you can get it for as low as $25. It has a IPS instead of a eINK screen, but the CPU, RAM, Storage, battery etc. are as good or better as any ereader, so it is possible to get a tech device for way less than $80-100. But I guess it won't count as mainstream and nobody should expect support. It relies on open-source software (ArkOS) and ships pirated roms of abandoned game consoles, so there is no option for the manufacturer (unknown) to earn more after the sale.
The Kindle is still amazing value for money at any price - especially when compared to others with a smaller ecosystem. And being able to sideload DRM-free books I get on other stores (while I can) is just icing on the cake since I want to actually own my books and read them in future devices.
That said, I am very happy with my Supernote Nomad as an e-reader as well (it is a note taking device, but runs the Kindle Android app) even if it is completely out of the price range the OP discusses.
I would argue that e-readers are cheap. My Kindle has been the single most value-per-dollar device purchase in my life.
Nine years ago, I bought a Kindle Paperwhite 3 for $259.49.
It still works. It still does just one job—and does it really well.
Unlike many other devices, I'm not tempted (or pushed) to get a new one every few years.
Apart from reading books, I send longer articles (using https://www.pushtokindle.com/) to read on eink, in a distraction-free, eye-friendly mode.
However, what does bother me is that eink displays are expensive in general. I had considered getting a few for my home, for dashboards (e.g., my quantified self health stats) and my favorite web strips. But these are really expensive. And, in this scenario, I'd ideally want to have more than just one display.
> My Kindle has been the single most value-per-dollar device purchase in my life.
I had an old Kindle with a keyboard, which I got with the official jacket-and-booklight accessory.
It was great. One day years later I let it update and it got a lot worse.
I also got a Kindle Oasis. There is no booklight option. You're supposed to use the built-in frontlighting, which is so bad that I never use the device at all.
I can't answer that question exhaustively, but they do have a USB drive mode* and airplane mode, if that's something you care about.
Though the models with ads (basically all of them) do track impressions of all the ad placements around the device, which includes the lockscreen (the display shows ads when it's in sleep mode, both before and after you press the power button), and a banner on the home page.
* - Amazon removed the ability to download books from them to put on your Kindle, but the new ones do still have a USB drive mode
AFAIK Amazon tracks every single metric they can as a policy. For kindles it’s books you’ve read, how much, when, words you’ve looked up in the dictionary, where you’ve connected from…
I find it amusing that after all these years we’re still supposed to believe it’s economics of scale, low demand, or costly manufacturing behind the reason a 2 inch epaper module costs $25 CAD even on aliexpress. Meanwhile physical retailers are installing them by the tens of millions on store shelves complete with microcontrollers and OTA updates for unit costs in the $4-6 range, meaning the actual eink module cost with profit margin for the manufacturer is a fraction of that. It was believable 15 years ago.
Store shelf screens are extremely tiny. If a 1 inch by 2 inch screen costs a dollar to manufacture. Then a 7 inch x 6 inch screen by linear scaling should cost 21 dollars to manufacture. But I think manufacturing costs are more than linear since the control electronics become more complicated and yields become lower (more pixels, more screens have dud pixels that need to be thrown away).
You've never seen one? They flip screens every few seconds, the whole aisle will gently flicker as the screens redraw. Sometimes. I've seen static ones, too.
> Unless you're prepared to get technical, you can only read Amazon books on your Amazon Kindle paid for with your Amazon wallet.
That hasn’t been true for a very long time? Unless by "technical" you mean sending an email with the file in question attached. E-Book platforms sometimes even directly support sending that mail.
> Other than Kobo and Amazon, no book retailer
… in the UK. From what I’ve heard, Tolino devices are decently popular in Germany, they are made by an alliance of booksellers.
Yes - that's what is meant by technical. As soon as you mention file, you've lost a lot of people.
Amazon isn't winning because it's the least expensive, it's winning because it's the easiest. They have a huge selection and one click to buy a book that shows up on all your devices without having to do anything more is where the bar is. If you ask people to manage their own books or expect them to understand what an epub or pdf or azw is (never mind encryption!) you are limiting your market to a pretty small slice.
> Yes - that's what is meant by technical. As soon as you mention file, you've lost a lot of people.
I believe you, and I'm sad about this. I had hoped as the Internet grew in importance, the proportion of people with basic computer skills would increase.
Again, e-book platforms that want to support kindle can do so without having to download a file.
Also for me, Amazon is winning both because the paperwhite has incredible value, and (that’s the sadder part) because of KDP Select which gives a higher share in exchange for 100% exclusivity, so those books (which includes some authors I read; > 99% of the releases are very badly written trash, though) are not available elsewhere.
> As soon as you mention file, you've lost a lot of people.
Attaching documents to an email is the one thing most people can actually do because without it you're unable to deal with your insurance, doctor, tax guy or what have you. In addition to web browsing it's the only thing my boomer parents with very few computer skills have figured out. You basically bureaucratically die otherwise in the modern world
The biggest issue is that most people probably don't know that Amazon even offers that feature, they I assume intentionally don't really advertise it much.
You can also jailbreak most kindles. I picked up my first one a couple of weeks ago here in the UK and intentionally bought it from Argos (high street shop) rather than Amazon so that I'd stand more of a chance of the installed firmware being slighly older as the jailbreak currently available was patched in the latest version (apparently it happens a lot, someone just finds a new way around it).
Took about 20 minutes to have it jailbroken and KOReader installed, I can now wirelessly copy over books from Calibre on my Mac to the kindle and don't have to touch amazons storefront at all.
> … in the UK. From what I’ve heard, Tolino devices are decently popular in Germany, they are made by an alliance of booksellers.
Pretty sure that, these days, Tolino devices are literally just Kobo hardware with Tolino firmware loaded onto them.
Which admittedly has made some of us regular Kobo users a bit envious, because Tolino devices somehow support sideloaded cloud syncing, while standard Kobo does not. So Kobo clearly knows how to do it, they just choose not to. :(
> Pretty sure that, these days, Tolino devices are literally just Kobo hardware with Tolino firmware loaded onto them.
I only read the German Wikipedia entry [0], but the way that sounds is that they are different hardware, but now using an adapted Kobo OS (with ways to switch between the normal Kobo mode and Tolino). But that’s just my impression, I have no further clue :D
> That hasn’t been true for a very long time? Unless by "technical" you mean sending an email with the file in question attached.
Was it ever true?
It's even easier to just load the book over a USB cable, assuming you have it in mobipocket. It's a "technical" process in the same sense that using a USB key is a "technical" process - one that everyone is already familiar with.
Though I do remember that the packaging for my Zen Stone specifically indicated that it would only work with a Windows computer. That wasn't true; it showed up as a USB device and you could transfer files just fine regardless of your operating system. There wasn't even an alternative proprietary method to use on Windows. The manual carefully covered the meaning of the directory structure on the device. I'm not quite sure why they claimed to require Windows.
You'd be surprised. Many people genuinely aren't familiar with it these days because it's not necessary for other devices they're using day-to-day. E.g. most don't upload music to their phones in this manner like we used to 20 years ago - more often, it's all "in the cloud", so you just install the app and sign in.
Having to own a desktop would be somewhat technical already. And you need the right format.
Nowadays, they support epub and you have the email thing (though as a sibling mentioned, they are apparently not allowing automatic email deliveries for paid books anymore)
I don't think it was ever true. Even way back you could always plug in your kindle via USB and drag and drop whatever books you wanted on it. As long as they were .mobi format they would read perfectly fine.
I think one reason for the eReader market not being big is that they're so good and sustainable. I bought my Sony PRS-T2 in 2012 and am still using it to this day. It has battery life for weeks, storage space for 100+ books and works just as well as when I bought it. It's really hard for me to motivate buying a new one when the only interesting "new" tech is backlight and I guess it's the same for most eReader owners.
The ~90e I paid for it back in 2012 was for sure good value!
I had the same issue with my Kobo, which I've had for about 8 years. I was looking at the replacements, but they're quite a lot of money for...what? Slightly faster page turns? A screen that might look a little bit better?
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?).
Agree! I bought my kindle in 2016 and have read hundreds of books on it. The cost per book at this point is in the pennies. It's not like you have to buy a new device every book, or even every few years.
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!
Do 20% really use e-readers? Sounds like a huge number. Do 20% even read frequently?
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 think it's mostly down to how cheap tablets and phones are. The cheapest Kindle on Amazon's site seems to be $130, which doesn't sound that expensive on its own. There's also a version full of adverts for about $20 less.
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.
For someone who has never used a Kindle/e-ink reader I would agree with you, they will be tempted by the "cheaper, more capable" device but as someone who has owned iPads/Fire Tablets/Android tablets _and_ an e-ink reader (Kindle) I can tell you it's a whole different world. E-ink is just so much nicer to read when you are reading a book and the battery life is amazing.
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.
> 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.
$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.
Yeah my impression is that Kindles last basically forever. They’re like typewriters where you should just buy the nicest one you can afford when you need it and use it until it can’t be repaired.
IMO Kindles were best when they had hardware buttons so I have no interest in buying these new touchscreen ones.
>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.
Yes when the alternative for a hardback book approaches $20, $100 every five or more years seems reasonable. If you wait you can likely get an older model on sale
Yeah, my Kindle is still working well enough after 10+ years. I haven't thrown it off any cliffs but I've dropped it a few times over the years. Whatever I paid works out pretty cheap at this point.
I think the main answer is smartphones displaced them. It's the same thing that happened to cheap digital cameras.
> As I understand it, Google requires Android devices to have colour screens and, so I've read, won't certify eInk eReaders for newer versions of Android.
Google has gone to great lengths to ensure that a phone without its proprietary libraries and SafetyNet attestation will not be palatable to mainstream consumers. An eReader is not a phone, and consumers do not have the same expectation that it will run every app in the Play store.
Some Boox brand eReaders use Android on monochrome displays, but those are far from the author's definition of cheap at $200+.
Tablets too. I should be shocked that nobody has mentioned the aggressively low pricing of Amazon's Fire Tablets, but somehow Fire Tablets are invisible to the technorati. (e.g. people used to ask "Why are Android Tablets dead?" and the answer is that Samsung can't compete with half-priced tablets subsidized by AMZN any more than your local taxi company can compete with half-priced Uber rides subsidized by Softbank)
Not only are the fire tablets priced aggressively but they can be used to watch videos, surf the web, listen to music, play games, use remote desktop, all sorts of things. And if you lose one you are out $30 instead of $300 or so for an iPad.
Can’t speak for others but the bizarre Android fork Fires run is a big part of what makes me rule them out.
That, and I have an Android tablet that was ~$250 when new that has various aspects about it that are somewhere between awful and underwhelming, and I can’t imagine a $30 Fire tablet to be any better in that regard, subsidized or not. That said my tolerance for electronics being bad in any capacity I feel on a day to day basis is low.
> Google has gone to great lengths to ensure that a phone without its proprietary libraries and SafetyNet attestation
This SafetyNet nonsense is now why I begrudgingly have an iPhone. After playing cat and mouse with Google for a long while, I'd had enough. The main reason I was on Android was because of the freedom I had (or, used to have). If I have to be walled in, Apple has a better garden than does Google.
That's not an entirely unreasonable take, though sideloading apps is still fully available on Google-approved Android and it is not on iOS.
I only have one or two apps I actually want to use that required a SafetyNet bypass. I don't think it's people like us Google is targeting with that though; the main goal as it seems to me is to ensure an OEM won't be successful marketing a phone that funnels less money to Google.
I used to have a Kindle. Eventually it broke. Kobos seem even less reliable, my wife has been through 4-5 of them so far.
After my Kindle broke I switched "temporarily" to using the Kobo app on my iPhone to read. Although the form factor isn't ideal for reading, it's just so convenient that I never bothered buying another eReader. It also has all the advantages of a modern smartphone: touches to turn the page are instantaneous; controlling brightness is familiar and easy; I can copy and paste text into Safari to search anything I'm interested in. About the only environment where an eReader wins is bright sun, and well, I live in Northern Europe.
So yeah, I think I would say, although they're a nice idea - eReaders just aren't strong enough in their own niche to beat out smartphones for a lot of people, which means that niche stays pretty small and prices stay quite high?
For me, a dedicated e-reader (Kindle in my case) has two or three benefits...
1. The screen is easier on my eyes. Especially at bedtime, when I do the majority of my reading.
2. The form factor - larger than a phone, smaller and lighter than a regular tablet. I find it much easier to use lying down (vs my iPad).
3. Cost - WAY less expensive than a good tablet. I can take the Kindle on a backpacking trip and not worry about breaking it. A hammock and an e-reader are my "luxury" items on these trips.
The main advantage for me of a dedicated e-reader is that I don't get distracted and do something else, which happens to me constantly when I try to read on my phone.
For me it’s kobo all the way. The ereaders are open by default (no need to jailbreak them because they don’t block from doing whatever you want with it), and are easier to repair (or upgrade, need more storage just put a larger SD card inside). Plus it’s not making bezos richer. Not to mention the terrible text layout engine on the kindle, i can put a ruler to the right edge of the text on my kobo.
And with koreader I can set it up exactly the way I like (invert Colors at sunset, customize gestures and taps, copy paste text on my phone via a qr code…) it’s very easy to install it on a kobo.
One of the most popular eReaders with the BookTok crowd is the Boox Palma, which is an eReader with the form factor of a phone.
It’s actually just an Android phone with an eInk screen, so you can run any android app on it. It’s just that eInk is terrible at everything but displaying static content so it’s not good for much besides being an eReader. Though you can also pull up a PDF reader or read emails if you really want to.
There have been several takes on "Android phone with eInk screen" to date, e.g. https://minimalcompany.com or Kingrow K1. They are fine for reading but for some reason the form factor doesn't stick; or at least I haven't seen any model like that remain in business for long.
4/5 kobos? What did happen to them? I suspect the screen broke after a fall. Happened to the one of my sister. In that case try to use an harder cover because 4/5 are a lot
Yeah, some were dropped, but not from great heights or anything - normal wear and tear that a regular smartphone would easily survive. She does have covers for them. I think one even had like a 1' fall onto carpeted stairs and then wouldn't turn on anymore.
I think her latest one has lasted a lot longer though, so maybe they've steadily become more sturdy...
I read a lot, and just use FBReader on my phone. I like e-ink displays, but I read a lot more with my phone since it's always in my pocket. I imagine if I read on the kindle app, I could switch back and forth between a phone and ereader, but reading bootleg epub files doesn't give you the best options for synching between devices.
I have a kobo. The firmware is absolutely terrible. Somehow it's gotten itself to a state where it doesn't detect books that are added to the device, even after fully reseting the hardware
I’ve had an Aura One for about the same amount of time, and yeah, it’s been no trouble at all. Love that it functions like a USB thumb drive and can take plain old ePubs without having to mess around with Calibre (which is powerful, don’t get me wrong, but that UI/UX… yeesh).
It's not more convenient to read on a phone. You have made it a habit and then made yourself believe that your habits are rational. Not only for you, but for the rest of the world.
E-Readers are absolutely better for reading than phones, that's why there's a big market for them.
It's wildly more convenient to read on a phone. I prefer the screen, form factor, and overall UX of an e-reader for extended reading sessions, but I haven't turned mine on in years because the phone is just sooooo much more convenient. Most e-readers don't fit in a pocket, and even if they do it's annoying to have to guess when I'll need it and carry the 2nd device. Whenever I have downtime....airport, doctors office, curbisde pickup, wife isn't ready to check out yet, lunch takes 5 minutes in the microwave....that phone/kindle for iOS is always ready to go. I probably do half my reading in 5-15 minute increments of formerly dead time. For a while I even tried switching to the e-reader whenever I sat down to read "for real", but even the relatively painless syncing process wasn't worth the minor UX benefits of the ereader. The phone is my least favorite way to read, but convenience is the one category where it absolutely mops the floor with e-readers(and paper for that matter).
It really depends on how you're reading. I find that smartphones are actually more convenient to use for reading lying down in bed, and the screen works better at night too because with modern OLED ones you can use black background with very dim amber text for very comfortable low-light and no-light reading. OTOH eInk is the best option for outdoors reading for sure, and the multi-week battery life is very nice when travelling.
Readit News
I got a Kindle Paperwhite for ~$100 in 2016 and still use it almost every day. Easily the best value gadget I have ever owned.
I removed the 3G modem when I replaced the battery to prevent it from being turned on and draining the battery as it constantly tries to connect. The microusb port is not in great condition and only works with the cable at certain angles. On the bright side, that's only an issue every few weeks when it gets charged and a new load of books.
My wife has the newest basic Kindle because she prizes light weight over any other aspect.
Zeugma in the wild.
On whether $100 is incredibly cheap/"chump change": It really is incredibly cheap, especially for a new electronic device you can use for thousands of hours over 9 years. That's not the same as a claim it's an easy expense for every person, if we become bound by that definition of cheap then there is no such price which everyone can easily afford and we lose the distinction. On that note, I often wonder if it's cheaper for libraries to just rent out ereaders than manage more physical book storage and exchange. I know my local library already does rentals but I'm not sure of the economics.
I'm curious how much you think an e-reader should cost?
Let's say the BOM for a bargain-bin e-reader is ~$65: e-ink display (~$25), mainboard (~$15), touchscreen and/or buttons (~$7), radios (~$3), battery (~$3), case (~$3), assembly (~$6), packaging (~$3). Forget about a charging cable. Then you've got to iron out the drivers and software, provide support, handle returns (which will be higher if you cheap out on materials) and turn a profit (assuming you're not Amazon). Let's say you charge ~1.5x BOM, now your product is ~$98.
Maybe you "borrow" your software and hardware designs from a competitor. Maybe you're willing to continuously change your company name so you can purchase low-quality parts without having to accept returns. Maybe you ask suppliers for a discount because you just know you're going to have enormous economies of scale and you're somehow more convincing than every other company (that isn't Amazon) asking for the same discount.
You do all of the above so you can sell your new e-reader for the insanely low price of $80. Will you move enough units for all that to be worth it? Are there really that many customers who would buy your $80 no-name e-reader instead of a second-hand Kindle?
A comparable entry-level model (Kobo Clara BW) today is €149 - 12% cheaper. It's also now waterproof and does bluetooth audio.
It's a niche product that doesn't really benefit much from economies of scale (think eInk displays of that size). I don't think anyone is getting ripped off here.
This progress will likely slow, patents will expire and then maybe prices will fall. But $100 for a device that will last you years seems okay.
What? They are cheaper. Costing the same now that they did 10 years ago is a price drop of 25%.
Also a paper book you'd carry every day with you for a year will look in much worse state than a Kindle.
Reading e-books is an affordable past time...
Infuriates me when the paperback is $4-5 cheaper than the ebook, henchman’s exactly uncommon.
I think I'm on my third now, and while I kinda begrudge buying new ones the paper-white I've got now, with backlight, is such a pleasure to use I can almost forgive it.
It's the best gadget I've ever bought.
Not to mention that you can just buy an old generation, or used/refurbished, if you want cheaper than that.
That said, I am very happy with my Supernote Nomad as an e-reader as well (it is a note taking device, but runs the Kindle Android app) even if it is completely out of the price range the OP discusses.
Nine years ago, I bought a Kindle Paperwhite 3 for $259.49. It still works. It still does just one job—and does it really well. Unlike many other devices, I'm not tempted (or pushed) to get a new one every few years.
Apart from reading books, I send longer articles (using https://www.pushtokindle.com/) to read on eink, in a distraction-free, eye-friendly mode.
However, what does bother me is that eink displays are expensive in general. I had considered getting a few for my home, for dashboards (e.g., my quantified self health stats) and my favorite web strips. But these are really expensive. And, in this scenario, I'd ideally want to have more than just one display.
I had an old Kindle with a keyboard, which I got with the official jacket-and-booklight accessory.
It was great. One day years later I let it update and it got a lot worse.
I also got a Kindle Oasis. There is no booklight option. You're supposed to use the built-in frontlighting, which is so bad that I never use the device at all.
Though the models with ads (basically all of them) do track impressions of all the ad placements around the device, which includes the lockscreen (the display shows ads when it's in sleep mode, both before and after you press the power button), and a banner on the home page.
* - Amazon removed the ability to download books from them to put on your Kindle, but the new ones do still have a USB drive mode
[1] after the very first time when setting up the account
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/SAEF-2-13-Inch-High-R...
I'd bet Amazon would be pretty willing to give away kindles that only work with a prime subscription.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
That hasn’t been true for a very long time? Unless by "technical" you mean sending an email with the file in question attached. E-Book platforms sometimes even directly support sending that mail.
> Other than Kobo and Amazon, no book retailer
… in the UK. From what I’ve heard, Tolino devices are decently popular in Germany, they are made by an alliance of booksellers.
Amazon isn't winning because it's the least expensive, it's winning because it's the easiest. They have a huge selection and one click to buy a book that shows up on all your devices without having to do anything more is where the bar is. If you ask people to manage their own books or expect them to understand what an epub or pdf or azw is (never mind encryption!) you are limiting your market to a pretty small slice.
I believe you, and I'm sad about this. I had hoped as the Internet grew in importance, the proportion of people with basic computer skills would increase.
Also for me, Amazon is winning both because the paperwhite has incredible value, and (that’s the sadder part) because of KDP Select which gives a higher share in exchange for 100% exclusivity, so those books (which includes some authors I read; > 99% of the releases are very badly written trash, though) are not available elsewhere.
For what its worth, we really should figure out how to e.g. bring the idea of "files" BACK.
Attaching documents to an email is the one thing most people can actually do because without it you're unable to deal with your insurance, doctor, tax guy or what have you. In addition to web browsing it's the only thing my boomer parents with very few computer skills have figured out. You basically bureaucratically die otherwise in the modern world
The biggest issue is that most people probably don't know that Amazon even offers that feature, they I assume intentionally don't really advertise it much.
Took about 20 minutes to have it jailbroken and KOReader installed, I can now wirelessly copy over books from Calibre on my Mac to the kindle and don't have to touch amazons storefront at all.
https://kindlemodding.org
I believe that stopped many years ago: https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/baen-books-can-no-l...
Its not difficult but I think a lot of non-technical users will have trouble with it:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email/
That does suck indeed.
Pretty sure that, these days, Tolino devices are literally just Kobo hardware with Tolino firmware loaded onto them.
Which admittedly has made some of us regular Kobo users a bit envious, because Tolino devices somehow support sideloaded cloud syncing, while standard Kobo does not. So Kobo clearly knows how to do it, they just choose not to. :(
I only read the German Wikipedia entry [0], but the way that sounds is that they are different hardware, but now using an adapted Kobo OS (with ways to switch between the normal Kobo mode and Tolino). But that’s just my impression, I have no further clue :D
edit: This [1] says you are right
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolino
[1] https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/the-kobo-cla...
Was it ever true?
It's even easier to just load the book over a USB cable, assuming you have it in mobipocket. It's a "technical" process in the same sense that using a USB key is a "technical" process - one that everyone is already familiar with.
Though I do remember that the packaging for my Zen Stone specifically indicated that it would only work with a Windows computer. That wasn't true; it showed up as a USB device and you could transfer files just fine regardless of your operating system. There wasn't even an alternative proprietary method to use on Windows. The manual carefully covered the meaning of the directory structure on the device. I'm not quite sure why they claimed to require Windows.
You'd be surprised. Many people genuinely aren't familiar with it these days because it's not necessary for other devices they're using day-to-day. E.g. most don't upload music to their phones in this manner like we used to 20 years ago - more often, it's all "in the cloud", so you just install the app and sign in.
Nowadays, they support epub and you have the email thing (though as a sibling mentioned, they are apparently not allowing automatic email deliveries for paid books anymore)
The ~90e I paid for it back in 2012 was for sure good value!
So I just didn't bother.
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.
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
> As I understand it, Google requires Android devices to have colour screens and, so I've read, won't certify eInk eReaders for newer versions of Android.
Google has gone to great lengths to ensure that a phone without its proprietary libraries and SafetyNet attestation will not be palatable to mainstream consumers. An eReader is not a phone, and consumers do not have the same expectation that it will run every app in the Play store.
Some Boox brand eReaders use Android on monochrome displays, but those are far from the author's definition of cheap at $200+.
Not only are the fire tablets priced aggressively but they can be used to watch videos, surf the web, listen to music, play games, use remote desktop, all sorts of things. And if you lose one you are out $30 instead of $300 or so for an iPad.
That, and I have an Android tablet that was ~$250 when new that has various aspects about it that are somewhere between awful and underwhelming, and I can’t imagine a $30 Fire tablet to be any better in that regard, subsidized or not. That said my tolerance for electronics being bad in any capacity I feel on a day to day basis is low.
This SafetyNet nonsense is now why I begrudgingly have an iPhone. After playing cat and mouse with Google for a long while, I'd had enough. The main reason I was on Android was because of the freedom I had (or, used to have). If I have to be walled in, Apple has a better garden than does Google.
I only have one or two apps I actually want to use that required a SafetyNet bypass. I don't think it's people like us Google is targeting with that though; the main goal as it seems to me is to ensure an OEM won't be successful marketing a phone that funnels less money to Google.
I used to have a Kindle. Eventually it broke. Kobos seem even less reliable, my wife has been through 4-5 of them so far.
After my Kindle broke I switched "temporarily" to using the Kobo app on my iPhone to read. Although the form factor isn't ideal for reading, it's just so convenient that I never bothered buying another eReader. It also has all the advantages of a modern smartphone: touches to turn the page are instantaneous; controlling brightness is familiar and easy; I can copy and paste text into Safari to search anything I'm interested in. About the only environment where an eReader wins is bright sun, and well, I live in Northern Europe.
So yeah, I think I would say, although they're a nice idea - eReaders just aren't strong enough in their own niche to beat out smartphones for a lot of people, which means that niche stays pretty small and prices stay quite high?
1. The screen is easier on my eyes. Especially at bedtime, when I do the majority of my reading.
2. The form factor - larger than a phone, smaller and lighter than a regular tablet. I find it much easier to use lying down (vs my iPad).
3. Cost - WAY less expensive than a good tablet. I can take the Kindle on a backpacking trip and not worry about breaking it. A hammock and an e-reader are my "luxury" items on these trips.
And with koreader I can set it up exactly the way I like (invert Colors at sunset, customize gestures and taps, copy paste text on my phone via a qr code…) it’s very easy to install it on a kobo.
It’s actually just an Android phone with an eInk screen, so you can run any android app on it. It’s just that eInk is terrible at everything but displaying static content so it’s not good for much besides being an eReader. Though you can also pull up a PDF reader or read emails if you really want to.
I think her latest one has lasted a lot longer though, so maybe they've steadily become more sturdy...
E-Readers are absolutely better for reading than phones, that's why there's a big market for them.