For a while Amazon loved selling the smaller units for a little as a dollar (and often including several months of Amazon music for free or almost free as well).
Sell enough of these 30 dollar gadgets for a dollar and it will add up quickly.
You should keep going with Brothers Karamazov. The first 150 pages are mind-numbingly boring. But starting at around page 151, it does indeed become one of the best, if not the absolute best book ever written.
According to both Merriam Webster and Oxford (not the OED, but the regular one) there are two definitions for retarded, both of which are offensive, and neither of which mean slow.
Of course YMMV.