You're looking at the wrong aspect of the cost. It's like buying a printer. The up-front costs are trivial compared to the operational expense.

What if the price of the e-books came down to a reasonable level -- say one or two dollars? My wife's Kindle is a year and a half old, and she has already spent more than four times the cost of the Kindle on the e-book downloads. If e-books were priced more in relation to what they cost to produce, an e-book reader would be far less expensive than printed books in the [not-so] long run.

tanstaafl.