I have setup a raspberry PI dashboard before and run into these exact issues. They are not defensive or pre-emptive. An e-reader will probably not have the same issues, just sharing my experience.

* Browser runs out of memory or has other issue and stops refreshing.

* Wifi connection drops and browser displays an error page and stops executing your refreshes. The power-saving options on the RPIs wifi caused me quite a bit of grief before I disabled them.

* Raspberry Pi crashes with kernel errors due to cheap SD card, underpowered USB power supply, or something else.

I ran into these issues one by one over a few months and fixed each one as I ran into it. What I ended up with was:

* Browser set to run at OS startup displaying my page.

* That page having a meta refresh tag, and javascript code to reload the page periodically.

* A browser extension to automatically reload the page as well if both of those failed.

* A watchdog daemon that detects when the RPI has frozen and reboots it.

* A cron job that reboots periodically.

With all of those my dashboard would run for months without any issues or interruptions. Just sharing so others can be aware of potential issues.