You can read ebooks on even a quite low-end smartphone; all you really need is a display large enough to present readable text. There are lots of cheap Android phones out there; you can get them subsidized on a cell contract and not pay anything out of pocket, or go prepaid instead and spend around $50 for a device capable of running Kindle for Android.

Sure, there's a small initial barrier to entry, in the sense that you have to have some device, where a paperback novel has no such constraint. On the other hand, how many paperbacks does $50 get you these days?