Myth, the Universe, and Everything

One of my concerns about access to books is wondering whether the poor have access to ebook readers. On the one hand, ebooks are (at least in principal, and sometimes in practice) much cheaper. And it matters that libraries have ebooks in their collections. But at present, most ebooks require a large upfront cost (roughly $100 minimum, sometimes substantially more). That makes me worry that the poor will have no access to ebooks, because they won't have readers, and decreased access to print books, because printed books will increasingly be the exception. Perhaps the declining cost of readers will make this concern moot, but in the meantime, I worry that technological changes will make books ever more accessible for the middle class and wealthy at the same time as they become less accessible for the poor.