None of this is terrribly new. Writing tablets and digital sketch stuff has been on the market for years. Ebook readers have been around for years. But this holiday season, your relatives who read but are not technophiles may come in closer contact with ebooks. Borders is going to be selling the Sony PRS-500 ebook reader.
A little googling to try to find the epaper technology to which I made reference in a Sony PRS-500 post, and I found iRex Technologies, a corp. that makes an epaper device, the wireless iLiad reader, which is linux based. (So development possibilities abound.)
The iLiad is a reader, but also has a bunch of other features. You can draw and write with a stylis, so you can digitize your sketches and drawings. And a couple of European newspapers are using the iLiad in conjunction with their daily subscription newspaper service. Basically, people get their daily papers wirelessly delivered on the tablet. And they don't have to drag their recycle bins to their curbs once a week.
The iLiad runs about $699 and the Sony PRS-500 is about $300.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILiad
