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Only 19 percent of U.S. adults owned an e-reader in 2015, and the numbers didn't vary much by sex, location or age. Twenty-seven percent of affluent individuals surveyed owned an e-reader, and they were the most enthusiastic buyers by far. Compare and contrast: 68 percent of U.S. adults owned a smartphone in the same year, and 87 percent of affluent individuals did, according to data from the Pew Research Center.
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Most business owners would be dancing in the streets if they had a product that was owned by 19% or the public and 27% of affluent individuals. It's true that a considerably larger number of people own cell phones, but that's pretty much irrelevant. It doesn't really matter that fewer people want a dedicated e-reader, what matters is whether or not the share of the market that wants a dedicated e-reader is large enough to merit producing them. Only about 4% of cars in the US are manual transmissions, but that's still a large enough market to be worth targeting.
E-readers do have advantages. Battery life is a huge one. With a tablet, I need to plug it in each day. An e-reader, I can go for days. I prefer reading from e-ink than from an LCD tablet. (I'm still using a Kindle Keyboard) I'll read on my phone only if I have neither an e-reader or a tablet. Of course, not everyone shares my preferences, and that's fine. But there's enough of the market that does so that e-readers are probably going to stick around for a while. If they were really dying, I would think Amazon would stop producing new models.