The Star Trek Kindle

I'm still working my way through Star Trek: Deep Space Nine with my oldest, and it's striking how much the "padd" the characters use for reading looks like a Kindle (DS9 was produced in the 1990s). Everyone in DS9 uses padds to read any sort of document, from novels to war reports. But what makes me chuckle is when they show us a character working hard, with four or five padds spread out on the desk in front of him. Did it never occur to them that you would probably be able to keep LOTS of documents on a small device in the future, and that as a result you wouldn't need to have five of the things cluttering up your desk at once?