[CyGuy]

I have read books on my computer for many many years. I am probably in the minority though. I think the reason it didn’t really take off in the past was the portability issue. Not so easy to drag a workstation around with you. Once laptops finally became smaller, lighter, and had acceptable battery life, I think computer reading picked up somewhat. Then along came netbooks and even more people got it in on it. Now we have a smorgasbord of portable reading devices with lots of local storage.

I personally wouldn’t read an ad-supported ebook myself. I would rather just pay a fair price for the ebook and read it how I want, where I want, when I want, in whatever format I want, on whatever device I want.

For me the huge difference between the web and an ebook is: The web requires connectivity, an ebook does not. I would never purchase an ebook that required a network connect to read, those should be stored locally.

I have seen an attempt at the opposite, the offline Wikipedia device called the WikiReader. To me this was backwards. Content that is ever changing and requires constant updates needs to stay connected. Content that is static (like books) should be stored locally, there is just no reason to require a network connection for static content.

In summary:
Web = dynamic content
ebook = static content
Two different animals.