The Kobo line seem nicely hackable.

They have a horrible bit of forcing the user to connect an account online during first power-up. This can be avoided with a bit of SQL. This site talks about "activating" without the desktop app (and other bits of tinkering):http://uscoffings.net/clc/tech/embedded/kobo-touch/

>Connect the Kobo via USB, and mount its onboard storage on your desktop machine.

> Ensure you have an SQLite3 database browser installed, or some way to execute SQL. For example, sudo apt-get install sqlitebrowser

> Open /mnt/onboard/.kobo/KoboReader.sqlite.

> Execute this SQL: insert into USER values("foo", "foo", "foo", "foo", "foo");

> Save, unmount, and disconnect.

Here's a bit about enabling Telnet (and cross compiling for Arm7): https://github.com/drj11/kobonotes

Here's someone who turned their Kobo into a GPS for their glider. http://hackaday.com/2014/05/28/e-reader-becomes-sailplane-an...

It's still a bit of a mess, and doesn't come with a decent keyboard, and the screens are tiny. I'd rather have something in a notebook formfactor – 12" eInk, full keyboard, and just a serial port on it. (Maybe also USB, for charging and slaved to a serial-to-uart adapter.)

Euhh, I'm not sure I understand your use-case, but e-ink displays aren't especially "cheap", or such. They take a noticeable amount of time to update the display, so doing things like typing, or viewing output from top(1) would be less than ideal. (This seems to get better with firmware, and being "smart" about which places of the screen get updated, generally)

The appeal, at least to me, is that they can display information with little energy cost. For example you could have it monitor the system's health and have it update every half an hour, showing graphs and such, and it would be able to do that for a very long time with a smallish battery.

I feel like I'm missing something - why do you need it to run on battery if it's consistently monitoring a specific machine? Isn't their power pretty much anywhere you'd need something like this?

I edited my use-case after he replied - I think he would be A-OK with something that could be reliably powered from a USB port. I don't speak for him, but I think we've chatted on this topic before.

You can power a "Full HD" monitor off USB. These have been around for a while, but it's really fun to see someone set up with dual screens at a coffee shop running on batteries: https://www.asus.com/us/Monitors/MB168BPlus/