Is the E-Reader Dead

Up until recently, I was totally off the grid with e-readers, meaning my purchases were never known. I bought 10-year-old e-readers for like $10 at my local used electronics store. I still bought physical books, but I'd download the epub as well and drop it on my reader over USB. To me, they were disposable devices with a utility I feel like I can't live without.

There wasn't an incentive to buy a new one up until the waterproof Kindle Oasis came out. I'd ruined my old e-readers in the bath, and this seemed like a worthy purchase.

I don't think e-readers are dead at all. They just tend to last a long time, and there hasn't been a lot of innovation to make people want to upgrade. I think once waterproofing hits the cheaper lines of e-readers, they'll see an uptick in sales, but that may just be me projecting my own use case.

My E-Readers are doing just fine.

E-Ink is much easier to the eyes than regular tablet screens, and the battery lasts several days.

The only downside is how they display PDFs.

I just bought the new Kindle Oasis. It's by far the best e-reader I've owned, and I've owned quite a few including the original Sony readers. After decades of staring at computer screens my eyes are very sensitive to harsh lighting, and so I can't read for long on an LCD/LED/AMOLED screen. Up until the Kindle Oasis my complaint was that e-readers were too hard to hold for very long. The offset balanced design solves that problem, finally.

My main concern with ebooks is preserving the books and my annotations for the rest of my life, at least. The former seems easy (I assume I can get DRM-free books easily enough?), but is there a platform-independent format for the annoations, and one that I can depend on being readable, or at least convertable to a newer format, in 30 years?

I bought a Remarkable. A completely different type of e-reader. While overly expensive I would say it represents the future evolution of e-readers. Mostly focused around realistic writing feel, making it easier to read .pdf and less eye strain.

I think price is a factor. I'd totally buy a large e-reader for things like holding manuals, recipes for the kitchen, etc but large e-ink displays are so expensive that these aren't places where it makes sense to bring one in.