Whatever happened to cheap eReaders?
Way back in 2012, The Guardian reviewed an eInk reader which cost a mere £8.
The txtr beagle was designed to be a stripped-down and simplified eReader0.
As far as I can tell, it never shipped. There were a few review units sent out but I can't find any evidence of consumers getting their hands on one. Also, that £8 price was the subsidised price when purchased with a mobile contract. Their website ceased working long ago.
But it got me intrigued. Moore's law is supposed to drive down the cost of electronics. So where are all the dirt-cheap eReaders?
The cheapest Kindle for sale on Amazon UK right now is about £100. Back in 2012, it was about £70. Taking inflation into account, that price has stayed static. Brands like Kobo are also in the £100 to £150 range.
About the cheapest retail eReader is the PocketBook Lux 4 for £85 or the (terribly reviewed) Woxter Scriba for £70.
AliExpress has loads of second-hand and obsolete models at cheap-ish prices. But a surprising dearth of new eReaders.
Going wholesale, Alibaba has a range of models, some of which clock in at around £30.
But, of course, that's before shipping and tax. They won't come with any manufacturer's warranty and don't expect any software updates. Also, good luck getting accessories!
So what's stopping new eReaders being released at a cheap(er) price? I think it comes down to four main things.
Reading is a niche hobby
Around 40% of UK adults didn't read a single book last year. That survey combines reading books and listening to audiobooks. Of the 60% who do read/listen, about 14% primarily listen. Of those that read, around 60% do so on paper books.
If reading is niche, reading electronically is a tiny niche! This is somewhat of a chicken-and-egg argument. If an eReader were the same cost as a mass-market paperback, I'm sure many more paper-book readers would become converts.
The whole point of an eInk reader is that it is a distraction-free environment. Yeah, you could scroll TikTok on one, but it isn't a pleasant experience. An eReader is designed for one thing only, unlike a phone or tablet. Do enough people want to carry yet-another-bloody-device just for reading?
eInk is expensive
The company which makes eInk hold several patents on the process. They're not a patent troll; they're building a business and selling mega-hectares of the stuff. Understandably, they have an interest in keeping prices high. They don't want to cannibalise their own market.
A basic 6 inch screen with wiring costs around £20 wholesale - that's from Alibaba, so doesn't include tax and shipping. That's before you've added any electronics or a operating system.
Speaking of which…
Android is a bottleneck
The promise of the Android Open Source Project was a free Operating System for anyone to use. The reality has been a little different. Most people want to be able to use basic Android functionality - like download operating system updates or reading apps. But Google doesn't allow that for eInk devices.
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.
So manufacturers have to source parts which have drivers for older versions of Android. Or they have to develop their own OSes.
Books are fungible
Back when Apple sold iPods, they knew that the majority of purchasers would buy MP3s direct from Apple. The perfect symbiotic relationship! But the walled-gardens cracked and now people can buy their music from anywhere.
Amazon keeps this model for its eBooks. Unless you're prepared to get technical, you can only read Amazon books on your Amazon Kindle paid for with your Amazon wallet.
Games consoles are often sold at a loss because the manufacturer knows they'll make it up in game sales and subscriptions.
A low-price manufacturer is unlikely to also run a book store and wouldn't be able to cross-subsidise their hardware with content sales.
Alternatives
Some people have tried building open source eReaders but they're either abandoned, not suitable for production, or ridiculously expensive.
Buying second hand is relatively cheap - often under £50. But eInk screens can be brittle, and older ones may have scratches or cracks which are effectively unrepairable.
How cheap is cheap?
I'd love a £8 eReader. Something I could throw in a pocket and not worry about damaging. An eReader which was the same price as a hardback book - around £20 - would be amazing.
But I don't think we'll get there soon. The monopoly on screen technologies sets a retail floor of around £30, before the rest of the hardware is taken into account. Niche hardware is viable - but only with decent OS support. Other than Kobo and Amazon, no book retailer wants to stray outside their core competency to develop and subsidise hardware.
So I guess it's buy second-hand, or wait for the patents to expire.
@Edent fascinating read Terence!
I’m still reading ebooks on my 2011 Kindle (and bought the same thing off of eBay as backup because I love the physical buttons and lack of ads/gimmicks).
Next up: I’ll be hacking its clone to see it free from the tyranny of Amazon 💁🏻♀️
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@blog To be fair, an ereader isn't a book, it is a library.
The shelves in my physical library are more expensive than that even before loading them.
@Edent
I don't feel e-readers are all that expensive; I don't think that's the main reason their impact has been limited.
I think it's mostly the walled garden aspect of books. You really can't get a book "wherever you buy books", but are locked into a silo. Kobo is better than kindle in that respect but that's still damning with faint praise. I can't give a book to my wife or a friend when I'm done with it. I certainly can't buy a second hand copy.
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@blog The ReMarkable 1 at least was based on a simple Linux kernel with a Qt app running on top. But I can see how Android is a nicer environment to build on top of.
The $100 dollar price point is simply what the average buyer of an e-reader is willing to spend on a device like this. It’s probably already subsidized down from $150–$200 by Amazon & co. You simply can’t make a profit or even a decent margin from the hardware alone.
Better buy 2nd hand & jailbreak.
@blog So, on this point:
Some of the vendors get around that requirement by shipping an AOSP-based Android build, and then installing Google Apps after the fact with what’s essentially an end-user-issued developer key. I’ve got a Boox device that used that approach to run Android 10, and AFAIK all of the newer ones (even the ones with color displays) do that too.
@Edent I wonder if the "strength" of the prices of eReaders is related to the level of ebook piracy. Sellers hoping to recoup profits lost on an ebook reader sold at a loss by selling ebooks at greater markup may have been undone by #booktok and its promotion of certain sites and the expectation that books should not be paid for. I wonder what the percentage of ebook readers paying for the books they read is - it sometimes feels that paying readers of ebooks are a niche of a niche of a niche.
BookTok
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I use a Kindle 3 from 2010. Works a treat and feels perfectly modern thanks to KOReader.
Absolutely worth picking up an old used Kindle for cheap. I can't say I've noticed any of my old e-ink screens being brittle or damaged as you noted.
I wrote some notes here:vale.rocks/posts/improv...
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@blog I used a Kobo as my flight computer for paragliding for years. Tough is how I would describe it. It led a brutal life. Eventually I bought another wing that came with a fancy nav computer. The Kobo was still as good but the case broke.
@Edent As an aside, I'm also a retro-ereader user - Sony PR-505 inspired by a post from @ifixcoinops I think. With the last available firmware it manages ePubs OK so long as the embedded graphics aren't so big they exceed the available memory.
I think that £8 device was more of a e-ink photo frame wasn't it? The ebook library was on the phone which converted them to graphic images and sent them over bluetooth - seems inefficient just to keep the device cost down.
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@Edent Had a look for a cheap eInk device with Android recently and, well, there isn’t one! Ended up getting the Boox Palma 2 (which was v expensive, despite a discount).
It has filled a gap and will hopefully last a while, but hopefully the Daylight Computer and other reMarkable models will grow the market for eInk devices and encourage new entrants to bring cheaper devices to market.
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@blog About 12 years ago I bought a 'nook' ebook reader for 30 pounds (new), I believe there was a campaign subsidising them in either London or the UK. But it's so long ago that I can't find a reference to the scheme.
@blog This might be it, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/aug/21/barnes-and-noble-asa-nook
I'm surprised eInk technology hasn't fallen in price given its huge applications to supermarket electronic price tags and digital signage.
I've been progressively switching all my reading to electronic format (my London house is much smaller than my former San Francisco one, and I don't have room for my former bookshelves). Apple Books allows you to pay authors for their work but its DRM is fairly easy to strip, the geofencing is a bit more annoying.
I was looking at ebook readers at Selfridges yesterday and they are all in the £300–700 range (Kobo and Remarkable), the same price as a full-featured bigger-screened colour LCD tablet like an iPad, which is just insane, not to mention some like the Remarkable require a pay-forever subscription, no thanks.
To be fair to Amazon (which is not an opener I will use often), it isn't especially difficult to use their Send to Kindle web UI (www.amazon.co.uk/sendtokindle and so on), but it is almost as poorly publicised as their customer service options.
I buy a fair number of ebooks from independent publishers (like Verso or Subterranean Press, for example) and drag-and-drop an epub (or PDF, DOC, DOCX, TXT, RTF, HTM, HTML, PNG, GIF, JPG, JPEG, BMP !) is so much easier than emailing the file and then having to faff about because Kindle's email allowlist function doesn't seem to work.
But I definitely agree that the lack of cheap ereader devices is a problem.
@blog Ridiculed in it's time (2011), ereader models https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kibano with a physical magnetic card https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Menca_memory_card might not in retrospect have been that bad if the card had been standardised and produced by several
V true. Have been wondering the same as my Kindle ages with no obvious simple replacement. A friend bought one reader recently - all £330 and 14" of it. The TCL NXTPaper has a great colour screen, but thats into iPad £ territory. http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DCJVWFZ...
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@Edent that’s interesting! Didn’t know they were ever advertised so low! I’m looking at buying one for closer to $600 usd, but it’s also a tablet designed for distraction free note taking and organizing.
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@Edent
Interesting article, though Android isn't needed, especially for something as limited in scope as an ereader. Most ereaders don't use Android. Sony switched to Android for T1, T2 & short-lived T3, with no advantage to them or the users. The T2 is no better to use than PRSx50 range and the T1 was worse.
It was fantasy, like a free iPhone – a mobile operator practice that should be illegal because it increases waste, limits diverse supply & puts up the cost of Mobile.
Cheap is Pearl. 🙁
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Gonna add DRM to that list. Sure, you can get a cheap e-reader, but without technical skills or hoping the publisher sells it non-DRMed, huge numbers of books are out of reach.
(Not just kindle, what is the licensing cost for adobe’s DRM scheme for hardware devices?)
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@Edent interesting read, thanks. If you go to a bootsale there’s nearly always e-readers for sale at very reasonable prices.
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