OK, I see. The wired netword part ist possibly to hard to go (at leat for me).
(but I can't forget the rapsberry pi, which drives ethernet over the usb 2.0 chip...)
The main idea is a bit rough at the time and comes from another projct I did: An old
Toshiba_Libretto which I use as an alarmclock. It's mainly a
special Linux distro, which runs without GUI and some shell scripts and ASCII Art (to have the time displayed in big numbres) and using cron for the alarm functions. Alarm sound is musik from the users playlist via nfs from my server, with a fallback to one locally stored track (if network is down for some reason).
So the device and monitor is on 24/7 it's not the energy friendliest device (ok 13W isn't that much..) and I was thinking to improve that by using the Pocketbook to get the powerconsumption a bit lower..
Perhaps (if it works) make a nice stand for the ebook, wich charges it and has some sort of ambilight controlled lamb to replace the missing backlight.
Fro proof of concept it's perhaps wiser to to the WiFi way for testing first.