> How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book.

In context, he's talking about reading books on a computer with it's CRT screen and he's correct. It wasn't the internet that made eBooks viable, it was computers coming in better form factors for reading. The internet was just the delivery mechanism.