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Did you read it? American Gods, I mean? You know, the toothsome slice of fantasy Americana by charmingly-coiffed author and sushi aficionado Neil Gaiman? If you're still confused, I'm afraid you'll have to hand in your Internet and lop off your mouse finger immediately.

If you missed it, then: Neil Gaiman and the publishing boffins at HarperCollins decided that it would be a rather marvellous idea, PR-wise, to let people read one of Gaiman's books for free, online. When this was announced in February, technology bloggers were impressed, with sites such as boingboing.net and shinyshiny.tv generally hailing the move as a good thing. The publishing world was finally acknowledging, like record companies before them, that it's counterproductive to ignore the mighty web. Of course, some naysayers and librarians got all frothy and indignant over the whole thing - wasn't giving books away just undermining the humble bookstore owner? Devaluing literature? Making a mockery of grand traditions, like bunking off college, going to Waterstone's and eating your weight in flapjacks?

So when the book was finally posted on HarperCollins' website, I just had to have a look. My husband was not at all perturbed by my bringing a laptop to bed, but he did become curious after I had spent an hour curled around the screen, motionless and silent. 'What are you doing?' he asked. 'I'm reading that Neil Gaiman book online. It's driving me nuts,' I replied.

You see, American Gods is a speeding juggernaut of

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a story, with myth, reality, sex and death on every corner; the sort of book that sucks up time, so that you might sit down for a spot of light reading one morning and look up a week later to find your family have chucked a dust sheet over you and gone on a Center Parcs mini-break. If ever a novel was a page-turner, it's American Gods. And that was the problem. Online, you just couldn't turn the pages fast enough. 'Perhaps they're getting a lot of traffic just now,' mused husband. 'Try again in a week.' Suspicions about my crappy ISP were laid to rest when other readers reported similar problems.

Of course, my husband was right. Coming back to the site a week later, I found the pages were loading more quickly. Perhaps lots of people had read a couple of pages, then decided to go and buy a copy. Perhaps they'd given up, or thrown their computers out of the window and kicked their ISP in the balls. Who knows? So I persevered with the online version, mainly out of duty and only partly out of financial embarrassment.

After a day or two, I found myself reading the book in one tab, with the Wikipedia entry for American Gods open in another. Every time a new character was introduced, I'd click to Wikipedia and read up on them. Then I opened another tab and began reading Gaiman's American Gods-era journal archives at the same time. I can't remember why I started doing this, but after a while I couldn't stop. I certainly wouldn't have bothered had I been reading the paperback, and it's probably healthier to just read a book and enjoy it as you find it, but the process was slightly addictive. It was like watching a DVD with the director's commentary; I couldn't give the story my full attention, but I learned much more than I would have had I gone it alone.

My final problem with the online book became apparent after inadvertently closing my browser window after a few days of intermittent reading. Now that I'd passed the 300-page mark (the book is over 600 pages long), it was nigh on impossible to find where I had been. Cue 20 minutes of scrolling and clicking, muttering like a loon: 'I've read that bit... read that... read that... argh, no I haven't! Back, back! Wait, who dies?'