Cheap tablets used to be 'cheap tablets'. If you have been watching, just in the past year tablet prices have dropped and specs have improved. I just bought one of these a couple weeks ago, and it it cost me ten bucks more than it does this week:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...ilpage_o01_s00
Good specs, nice screen, decent battery. Look at Amazon's least expensive e-ink device compared to that. And that is why e-ink devices are going to continue to lose ground. You can read on a decent tablet, and do most of your computing on it. Economically e-ink devices become a harder choice as time goes by. Doesn't mean that are not better for reading on in a number of ways, but if they had kept pace with tablets on price and improvements, we would have awesome $30 e-ink devices right now and it would be a different story.