Solar panels are now down below US$1 per watt; some of them are 22% efficient, which works out to about 220W/m² in full sunlight. The Dell Inspiron Mini 10 netbook I'm typing this on is 26.8cm × 19.7cm, or about 0.05 m²; a solar panel occupying that space would yield almost 12 W in full sunlight. The keyboard is big enough to type on comfortably.
Suppose you wanted to design a computer in this form factor that could run off such a solar panel, without a battery. If you covered one side of it with a US$10 solar cell, then at times it might have up to 10 watts available, but often it would need to run on 1W or less, and it would have to handle the loss of power well: ideally without the screen going blank or losing data or anything. Even 1W is a lot better than you can reasonably provide with a handcrank, and it’s solid state.
Probably you need an E-Ink screen (so you can keep reading without using energy), a couple of different processors, a physical keyboard, some capacitors, and Flash storage would be in order (although FRAM, MRAM, or PCM might also work; I suspect MRAM has longer retention; but NAND Flash is huge compared to the others. Any kind of HTML5 site is going to suck shit at best.
https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/EA%20EPA20-A/1481-1130-ND/4896769 is a 172×72 pixel SPI e-paper display http://www.lcd-module.com/fileadmin/eng/pdf/grafik/epa20-ae.pdf of 59.2mm × 29.2mm for US$46.28; it runs on 3.3 volts. This is unacceptably lame compared to a Swindle screen.
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Best-quality-6-0-eink-screen-ED060SC3-for-ebook-reader-eink-display/544963786.html is a US$50 E-ink display which is supposedly 6", 1280×1024, 5ms response time, and 16.7 million colors, which I don’t trust one word of except that they’ll take your US$50.
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Original-ED060SC4-ED060SC4-LF-6-e-ink-ebook-LCD-screen-for-Amazon-kindle-2-for-PocketBook/32242651648.html is a "100% Original ED060SC4 ED060SC4(LF) 6” E-link EBook LCD screen for Amazon kindle 2 for PocketBook 301 plus for Sony PRS500 600”. For US$14. I think I believe this one. The PocketBook 301+, from 2009, has an 800×600 16-level grayscale display, and this does seem to be it.
A datasheet at http://essentialscrap.com/eink/ED060SC4V2.pdf reveals details. It's 122.4mm × 90.6mm (or 137.9mm × 104.1mm around the outside), about 21% of the size of this netbook, so using two might be good: 1200×800 total pixels for US$28. (Or maybe three.) 800 pixels over 122.4mm is 153μm/pixel, so a 12-point letter is about 28px tall by 14px wide. It has a 39-pin interface, needs negative and positive 20 volts or so to run it, updates in 1000ms, and uses 600–1250mW while it’s doing so, so about 1 J per screen update, or about 2μJ per pixel update, 48 μJ per tiny 4×6 letter displayed, 80 μJ per small 5×8 letter displayed, or 784 μJ per 12-point letter.
That datasheet does not reveal the protocols to use to control it, but those should be available from somewhere, or for some similar display. They’re clearly parallel, so you need about 25 GPIOs to control it.
784μJ per letter is 4.7 mJ per 6-character word, so reading at 350wpm would consume 1.6 joules per minute, or an average of 27mW.
(Hmm, somewhere else I was thinking