I hear you, but I remain skeptical about any sort of significant uptick in adoption of, not of e-reading in general, but of these particular books. You mention

I hear you, but I remain skeptical about any sort of significant uptick in adoption of, not of e-reading in general, but of these particular books. You mention a friend who read chose to read "Madame Bovary" and "Anna Karenina" upon discovering a cheap and convenient e-book format. Those books are classics in the Western Canon, yes, but they are also slogs, by some measures. The other thing that happened, and continues to happen in parallel with the explosion of e-reading tech, is an explosion of other things to (copyrighted) read, written in the modern colloquial, (perhaps more) relevant to modern times. The rise of the tepid, self-published novel on Amazon is the best example of this. I can believe that there is a latent desire out there for more good books to read or a cool new tech to use to read them, but I doubt very much that very old books in the public domain sate that thirst in any significant way. I think your friend is in the minority.