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I think a couple of comments earlier nailed the fundamental disconnect between reading and the Web.
When you read a book, you want an immersive and by its very nature solitary experience.
I don't want the equivalent of Facebook chatter and Farmville spam being battered away at me while I am reading a book...I don't want a Twit feed while reading.
There are two modes of using the web: community (interactive) and grazing (consuming) -- a lot of web-oriented folks assume that making something more of an "interactive community" experience automatically makes it better (because it improves stickiness to the community and in turn gives the owner of that community more opportunities to sell you things).
With books, interactiveness actually harms the product.
Multimedia stories with integrated interactivity could well turn out to be the amazingly cool medium of the 21st century...but they are not books.
Book communities, where people can chat about ideas, etc. are a great addition to the book experience for those who want them...but I feel the push to integrate them directly into the reading experience is really making it needlessly far. The same benefit can be accomplished with simple message boards, etc. that can be accessed by an ordinary web browser.
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