The price has stayed the same, the devices haven't. The screen on the reader you buy today is a mile better than the one 10 years ago.
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.
Hum... I haven't checked on the last 3 or so years. But last time I was out to buy one, I couldn't find anything with a screen as good as the one I brought 5 years earlier. And most had severe software constraints.
And I've never seen anything on the market that even competes with my first reader that I brought around 2010.
Those things seem to be getting constantly more expensive, with the "cheapest price" being maintained by launching smaller models. All while constantly getting lower contrasts and less oriented towards offline usage.
What 2010 reader did you have? The $140 6" Kobo Clara BW for example is far far better than original $150 6" Kobo of 2010. Screen is much sharper and higher contrast, supports touch, it's way faster, has WiFi, front light, software does more, 16 times the storage. Only thing it lost is SD card support and the shitty dpad and I guess Blackberry integration.
Kindle is a similar story, although some value the physical keyboard and 3G.
And what smaller models? Most eReaders have been 6" since the days of the Sony Librie. Recently we have had explosion of larger readers too.
Now granted, the color models don't have the best contrast, but I'm pretty sure a modern Carta 1300 BW reader will be superior to your what 8 year old Carta HD reader, even with extra layers.
I had an Irex. The company went out of business a few years later. It had an 11" screen, very high contrast, supported note-taking over any kind of content, and had a nice modules API.
> Most eReaders have been 6" since the days of the Sony Librie.
7" readers were common when I brought my current one, but nowadays there are only 6" ones out there. A bit before I brought mine, there existed 8" ones, and Amazon launched an interesting A4 sized one.
You had a very niche device at the time that was far from the typical reader of 2010.
7 and 8" inch devices very much still exist. Kobo has the 7" Libra Colour and the 8" Sage. Amazon also moved the popular Paperwhite line from a 6" device to 7". Pocketbook has 7 and 8" readers. 7" only got MORE common if anything. Six inches was the most common eInk size for a long time.
You can still get big format devices with notetaking. Now the big brands like Amazon and Kobo have them in addition to smaller players like Boox or Meebook.
That's very much bigger than a book, so I think that's probably why it's harder to replace.
There are still large format paper devices. Kobo Elipsa 2E for $350, Remarkable 2 for a touch more, etc etc. They're not sold as ebook readers, but you can read books on them fine.
That's just not true. The screens on average have gotten better but not by that much.
Still to this day, people will say that the Kindle Voyage still has the best screen of an e-ink device and well it came out just over 10 years ago.