Hi. Thanks for your feedback on the article. :-) It is certainly feasible to roll one's own E-Book reader, and I would venture as far as saying it's within imagination to hit a bill of materials lower than the USD$100 mark in any reasonable volumes. I would make it using an SOC (need to find one with AMLCD) with sufficient on-chip flash and SRAM to run something small but viable like ucos or possibly just bite the cost a bit and add sufficient flash and sdram to run linux, and have it read SD cards for content. Adding expansion like AC97 audio, and things like SD wifi or other media should also be possible. By the way, I posted a video of the older version of metrnomefb running with X clients here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or3R3Q8oyuE I can try to take a better video of a more recent version if people are interested. Thanks again.