Reading between the lines with Kindle

Take Amazon's new Kindle, this season's much-hyped new electronic reading device that allows you to instantly, wirelessly download any of 90,000 titles from the online retailer's database. Despite its $400 price tag, first-generation clunkiness and mid-80s design aesthetic, the Kindle actually provides a pretty darn good reading experience.

But try telling that to anyone who first read "Treasure Island" at age 11 and could still tell you whether the cover illustration on that copy had Long John Silver in a red pantaloon or a black one. Or to anyone who's ever discovered a first edition among the musky tomes of a used-book store. Or to anyone who, upon conquering Proust, has immediately promoted the whole set to the top of their bookshelf, alphabetization be damned.

Jason Epstein, a longtime editorial director of Random House, founder of its Anchor Books imprint, co-founder of the New York Review of Books, and first-ever recipient of the National Book Award's Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, is himself a bibliophile of sorts.

Reached at home not long after he'd finished reading a new translation of "War and Peace" (the third time he'd read the novel), he had just begun the latest volume of John Richardson's multipart biography of Picasso. "There's no way you could read that book on a screen," he said, jazz humming in the background. "Even if you leave out the color illustrations, it's a very complicated book. You've got to be able to concentrate on it," he said. "To go back, and go ahead, and look at the footnotes.

"Try to read a serious book on that," he said of the Kindle. "You won't be able to, I don't think."

This is true. The Kindle makes it almost impossible to flip quickly between pages -- since there are no pages. Locating a hastily read passage from earlier in the book is not even worth trying. To do so, you have to correctly guess and then input its numerical "location," of which a longish book can easily have 10,000. Let's see, that uncle character appeared a ways back . . . so . . . 3,458?

But let the Kindle bashing end there. No technology gets it right on the first try, and dwelling on one device's shortcomings misses the broader point. A visually tolerable digital reading experience is here. As the e-book iterates, that experience will just get better. The digital readers will become more attractive and less expensive. Color will replace black and white, and buttons will disappear in favor of touch screens.

Practical and economic considerations will add up too. Think of all the books that are out of date upon publication. According to statistics from the Book Industry Study Group Inc., a market research firm that tracks the U.S. publishing industry, of the nearly 3.2 billion books expected to sell in 2007, almost 9% are high school and college text books, and another 9% are professional and reference books that cover fast-moving areas such as business, law, medicine and science. That's 570 million books that you can never, ever update, and it'll be the same next year.

And then, of course, books don't grow on trees. The Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit organization devoted to helping print industries conserve forests, estimates that between 20 million and 30 million trees are cut down each year to supply the paper for books sold in the United States alone.

But no one's arguing that we should continue plowing down our forests or churning out obsolete encyclopedias.

The defenders of the printed volume are arguing from their gut. They see the book as much more than a physical object. To many lifelong readers and writers, the book is culturally sacrosanct and even intrinsic to literature itself.

"People who care about literature care about substance and permanence," wrote novelist Jonathan Franzen, author of "The Corrections," in an e-mail. "The essence of electronics is mutability and transience. I can see travel guides and Michael Crichton novels translating into pixels easily enough. But the person who cares about Kafka wants Kafka unerasable.

"Am I fetishizing ink and paper? Sure, and I'm fetishizing truth and integrity too."

But how can truth depend on whether the words that express it are printed on an electronic page or a paper one? Are they not words in both cases? Confronted thus, Franzen remained firm.

"Yes, in theory, words are words," he replied. "But literature isn't data. The difference between Shakespeare on a BlackBerry and Shakespeare in the Arden Edition is like the difference between vows taken in a shoe store and vows taken in a cathedral."

While author Cynthia Ozick did not elevate the book to quite that level of beatitude, she did share Franzen's passion. "I absolutely repudiate and eschew the Kindle!" she declared in an e-mail. "Even if in its next version an olfactory element is introduced; even if in its next version a tactile element is introduced; even if in its next version it accepts cookie crumbs between the lines."

Ozick did admit to what she called "stubborn regressiveness" and subjectivity to her feelings. "Nostalgia? Sentimentality? Investing a physical object with personal history?" she asked.

"Well, yes."