Sure, race to the bottom, but that's got nothing to do with OP's original claim of "expensive", nor the costs to actually manufacture electrophoretic displays, nor patents. How many competitors are there for Microsoft Windows? How many competitors are there for Google search?

What price do you think is "not expensive"? How did you determine that price?

> Amazon is forced to pay a higher price per unit for an eInk screen than a similar sized LCD.

Again the comparison to LCD despite all my multiple comments to explain that the two technologies are no where the same in terms of physical stackup, and volumes of multiple order of magnitudes of difference. It is like comparing coca cola to wine, or a toyota corolla to feraris. By the way to claim Amazon is "forced" is ridiculous. In fact, Amazon's volumes is what has enabled electrophoretics stackup to seriously commerciallize and bring prices down at least by an order of magnitude.