The only thing stopping me from buying one of these E-ink readers is the fact they only render in shades of gray. Sure that's perfectly fine for reading a novel or even newspapers but if you are reading a book about photography for example, well unless the book is about B&W photography you are kind of missing out on the whole point...

In Canada they just launched this service which uses the 1X network to monitor your home. It's much more advanced than classic alarm system because you can also self-monitor over the Internet, get paged/IM's/texted/emailed when something happens in the house etc. It also supports motion activated cameras that send pictures to your web account. I'm sure a similar service must exist in the US. Bottom line is this will work even if you're on VoIP... Oh, and no I'm not affiliated with them, I just thought it was relevant to the discussion. I have not tried them myself but will consider them when my current contract expires.