The iLiad

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILiad

This is no reference to Homer but to a portable device that let's you read and write just like you can do on paper. The image is stable in the sense that it isn't getting refreshed 60 times a second or so. The subliminal flicker caused by this refreshing is what makes reading ebooks on a computer quite tiring on the eyes. The technology is called e-Ink and involves the manipulation of little microcapsules that appear as black or white pixels depending on whether a positive or negative charge is applied. The slow page refresh, more than adequate for book reading, means that animation is not possible and the display is limited to black and white.

The fact that you can write on it with a stylus and thus add notes to what you are reading or draw your own diagrams is of course very useful. Connectivity is via Wi-Fi or USB cable and the price is around US$600 which I can't really afford at the moment but hopefully I can buy it in the middle of the year. I have a growing mountain of ebooks to read but I'm not getting through them using the software-based ebook readers on my computer and laptop. The good thing about technology however, is that the longer you wait to buy a technological device the cheaper and more feature-rich it becomes.

POSTSCRIPT (written 14th October 2018): 

Here is the start of the Wikipedia article:

The iLiad was an electronic handheld device, or e-Reader, which could be used for document reading and editing. Like the Barnes and Noble nook, Sony Reader or Amazon Kindle, the iLiad made use of an electronic paper display. In 2010, sales of the iLiad ended when its parent company, iRex Technologies, filed for bankruptcy.

Well I fortunately never did buy an iLiad but I did buy a Kindle some years later, in early 2015, for a little over US$100. I'm still using toward the end of 2018 and have felt no need to replace as it does its job. It's fine for ebooks but not adequate for PDFs so I use my old iPad for that.