It's not just Kindle; the problem is the screen technology. The eInk screens give major battery savings but render images dreadfully. Tablets and such like that don't use eInk screens render images beautifully but burn batteries. As the technology improves eink rendering of images is certain to improve. After all the technology is not much more than ten years old.
Actually, I'm not yet an author, but very definitely an engineer. I first designed a kind of Tablet in 1987. The eInk screens may get slightly faster (at expense of more power to turn a page), but the technology is inherently really black and white (monochrome). The last two generations of screen (front lit pearl and slightly brighter, clearer version) are very incremental. Biggest change is from the first Sony model and other pre Kindle models to the 2nd Kindle. Suitably prepared monochrome (grey shades) images can look excellent. Currently the grey scale relies very much on dithering. Inherently it can ultimately natively only do 4 shades per pixel as each dot is similar to a rotated bead. This means you can easily do Black, White and one or two in between shades. If they figure how to rotate the ball more partially then you can have more grey shades.
Colour, because it's ambient light reflected from a grid of very tiny balls would be very much darker and probably result in a poorer resolution image as the balls can't be much smaller, with colour you need three in-line sub pixels or a 2 x 2 grid of sub pixels per image pixel.
A kindle (and similar readers ) and DLP projectors are practically "steam punk" display devices. Baird's TV was pre-dated by the idea of CRT based purely electronic TV, and was a technological dead end, but he'd be delighted, if he was alive, that we have a mechanical video projection (millions of rocking mirrors on a chip the size of a finger nail) and a mechanical display eBook.
There is of course "Mirisol"* but despite repeated promises the Tablets / eBooks have not appeared. Only a "proof of concept" watch. It's also mechanical but manages a slightly dull colour and nearly video!
For Hard SF you only need to "invent" a smaller Fusion Reactor and a Jump Drive. Maybe some Genetic Engineering. Lots of everyday stuff with its roots in the Victorian Era is pretty amazing.
(* I can't link yet see Interferometric_modulator_display on Wikipedia )
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