I've seen a couple who hacked together setups using Android e-ink tablets, but I'd love to see someone make (and sell) a product with a little more polish.
The main barrier is that almost all modern GUIs depend on high refresh rates, but it's not hard to imagine a GUI designed from the ground-up for ePaper. Little-to-no transitions, pagination instead of scrolling, maybe a customized version of Firefox with a prominent Readability toggle, etc
I wouldn't be surprised if the e-ink display market exploded in the near future with Dasung getting the refresh rate into usable territory and the availability of color e-ink. I been trying a couple of things to help with eye fatigue and the following helped me quite a bit: setting up "Breaks For Eyes" for osx to remind about taking breaks, switching to the light "Brutalist" theme for emacs and moving most of my longform reading to a Boox e-ink tablet, though I wish the Android Pocket app would support pagination and there was a good Reader-mode-by-default browser.
Doesn't unnecessary refresh deterioration the e-ink display and diminish its power efficiency? I really see no reason for the display to refresh until the actual information you need to view changes. What do you need a higher refresh rate for? Wobbly window effects, smooth scrolling, verbose build output and intense action games?
I really don't want the screens to adapt by increasing refresh rates, I want the software to adapt by ditching scrolling for pagination, giving up unnecessary visual effects, decreasing verbosity (only displaying what I really want to see) etc.
The main barrier is that almost all modern GUIs depend on high refresh rates, but it's not hard to imagine a GUI designed from the ground-up for ePaper. Little-to-no transitions, pagination instead of scrolling, maybe a customized version of Firefox with a prominent Readability toggle, etc