A pretty dumb eInk display that could do one thing, that is, receive and blit a bitmap at a given location, would suffice for great many uses. It only needs a way to connect to wifi or zigbee securely, e.g. using TLS.
Such devices exist are are expensive, more so than e-readers.
This is sort of related to a revelation I had once I got into Home Assistant.
The usual idea is a that a smart home becomes filled with smart devices and yet what worked really well for me was having dumb devices with a very smart brain in the middle.
Buttons, switches, lamps, and sensors are commodify Zigbee devices and the entirety of the logic and programming is done on the Home Assistant server. The downside is latency.