I had one of these and thought it was pretty cool to scan the ISBN barcodes on the back of my books and make a catalog of my books. That didn’t take very long and then I wondered what I would use it for and was very confused as a 13 year old what in the world the business model could be to keep them afloat, because it made no sense to me to give them away or charge so little for the device. I was similarly confused by the various toolbars you could install that would pay you to browse the web (which I hooked up to some mouse jiggling script to keep it working while I slept). I did get at least one check for $15 from that which seemed magical at the time.
It was the razor blade model. It cost us under $10 per unit to make and we charged licenses for content creators to make their physical world items tie into digital content to interact with the brand new web world of 2000. One may also call this a chicken or the egg problem. Y2K was amazing.