I have read couple of novels online and I must admit that they can stress eyes somewhat. Reading them from laptop's screen does not "hurt" so much so I prefer it if I really have to read it from screen. If I find something really good or useful I normally print them. It's friendly to eyes and convenient otherwise also (can't drag my PC to toilet for example...) Of course I buy books from time to time, even if I have them as digital copy. Especially old books are one of my passions. They feel and smell wonderful. I like the way the pages feel in fingers and how the paper looks like. I like old finnish language very much as well as how they typed in old times with fraktuura-fonts (the german type of writing). I would love to get some really old books in my collection but they are out of my reach, they just cost too much. But some of them I can acquire online - even if I print they don't feel the same but at least I can read them and that's good enough for me, usually.
Anyways... Online books are really good since some of those books I'm interested in are hard to come by - they are quite impossible to get (because they are rarities) or just costs way too much (for various reasons). So whenever I want to read something that would be hard to acquire by other means I try to find them from internet. Usually I do find something : not necessarily what I was looking for but something similar and just as much interesting. From web (and especially those sites I mentioned) I have found tremendous amount of good quality books I'm really interested of. Sometimes I use P2P networks but it does not work so well, usually. I guess people just don't have or just won't share old books (or their digital copies).
Oh, by the way. Just happened to find out this site :
http://www.classichorrorstories.com/Some really great horror stories there. And they are not that long they could give your cancer, I hope
