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Manufacturing issues also cause the cost of things to scale by more than size. I don't know how applicable it is to eInk screens, but it definitely happens in chip productions.
Suppose you have sheets of product rolling off your manufacturing line. You can either set up to make 4 small screens per sheet, or 1 big screen that is 4x as large. Manufacturing isn't perfect, and there is a 25% chance that any 1/4 section will have a fatal flaw in it.
If you are set up to produce the small screens, 1 in 4 gets rejected, but 75% of the small screens pass QA. If you are set up to produce the large screens, all 4 sections have to be perfect, so only 31% can be used (0.75^4). That means you can actually produce 10 times as many small screens for the same materials cost as one large screen. Even if you are producing both at high volume, your materials costs are 10x on the big screen, not 4x.
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