is there a way to read a book online?

Answer 1

Yes there are many books in on-line libraries that you can read for free on-line (or download and read off-line). Most of the are old (copyright expired, and therefore legal), but culturally significant classics. Generally they are plain text files but I guess some are formated now.

A few randomly selected sites:
http://www.gutenberg.org/
http://etext.virginia.edu/
http://www.ipl.org/