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Palm Pilot, Newton, etc. But as numindast said, they weren't really commercially viable ereaders because they couldn't meet most consumer expectations. It's not really a fair comparison.
Still, why haven't ebook readers come down in price faster? Probably low demand at the price point. VCRs remained very expensive for years before they finally became cheap enough, and the supply became large enough, that the mass market could justify buying them. One this starts the pressure to make them more cheaply increases, which results in faster rates of adoption, and you get mass-market success.
Amazon has been successful in addressing the supply problem and in lowering the price, to the point that they've now sold more ereaders and ebooks than anyone else before. Once they've sold 2 million or so Kindles the price should start coming down.
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