Before widespread adoption of the Internet, there was no universal way to download new reading material. But the most fundamental problem was the lack of a display technology that could compete with paper when it came to ludic reading. But for e-books there are even more factors, including resolution, flicker, luminance, contrast and glare. Most typefaces were not designed for screens and, thanks to a limited number of pixels, are just fuzzy reproductions of the originals. The result is that reading on-screen is hard on the eyes and takes a lot more effort.
People do it only for short documents.
The longer the read, the more irritating and distracting are all the faults in display, layout and rendering. Most of these problems are now being solved. The World Wide Web offers an amazingly flexible way to deliver books in bits and as investments in broadband infrastructure increase, it will get even easier to stock an e-library. There have also been some incredible technological breakthroughs that will make it much easier to read long texts on a screen. Microsoft has developed a font display technology called ClearType that, by manipulating the red, green and blue sub-pixels that make up the pixels on an lcd screen, improves resolution by up to a factor of three.