THE WEB, ETC. - WEB SCOUT - Reading between Kindle's lines - The e-book reader raises questions about the fundamentals of literature and its future.

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 $$399 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.

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 not surprisingly a bibliophile.

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 -- because 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.