Is the Kindle dying? A cursory check suggests otherwise. Checking the sources on the "Sales" section of Wikipedia, they sold $5bn of devices in 2014 [0], and then hit a decade-long high in 2024 [1]. Now that's much to go on, and could easily have been worded carefully to imply things that aren't true. But at worst it seems like Kindle sales are doing fine. At a ballpark of $200/device, and assuming 2024 is as low as 2014, that means they sold a ballpark of 25 million devices in 2024. The percent of people reading ebooks annually is also increasing [2] (albeit slowly; arguably it's actually flat, but that's still not dying).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Kindle#Sales

[0] https://allthingsd.com/20130812/amazon-to-sell-4-5-billion-w...

[1] https://tech.yahoo.com/phones/articles/amazon-unveils-kindle...

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/01/06/three-in-...

Edit: also MSRP on ebooks is lower than for print versions (very roughly 50%, based on a couple randomly checked books)

It's hard to evaluate the cost of a ebook vs physical book without knowing the cut that the author and publisher get of the sales price.

I might be misreading your message, but most ebooks I buy are in the $5-15 range, whilst physical books I buy are usually $20-30 range. I'm reading your message as in "they are equally expensive" which is not the case. But I'm having a bit of trouble parsing your second sentence lol.

> that ebooks are sold at par with at a premium to physical books still bothers me, and I think is responsible for the fact that the Kindle is dying

Ebooks have always been priced this way. How can it contribute to its dying when it was this way during the "glory" days?

A number of authors have written about this and the tldr is that ebooks aren't really any cheaper to produce.

Paper is cheap. Shipping is cheap. The incremental cost of making a physical book is so small as to be noise in the overall book price.