The assignment: to preview two different e-books -- the Rocket eBook and the Softbook -- and to convey a sense of the e-reading experience and how it might differ from the standard page-turning variety, and after a few sentences of hard-earned grumbling I will do just that. Indeed, I promised my editor that I would suspend as much as possible my biases against the very concept of a portable reading device. Which is precisely why I was trying to load into each apparatus a few titles that I might actually want to read.

The Softbook loading event was not so much a failure as a disappointment. The system is new and the "bookstore" from which I was supposed to download what I wanted via telephone hookup had only five titles on tap. If I was not up for Stephen King's latest, or the fiberboard prose of Mr. Bill Gates, I was pretty much out of luck. Except -- what fortune! -- my Softbook already carried, complimentary, the full text of Jack London's The Sea Wolf, a novel I remember quite enjoying when I was about 12. Well, it would have to do.

Trying to get text into my trim little Rocket eBook was what had me lambasting whoever it was who first harnessed electricity. The process of trying to a get a nine-pin plug into a 25-pin aperture (I eventually got use of another computer), then doing the hunt and peck to register, start an account, pick a name, verify that name, and figure out the protocols that would let me get a title off a hodgepodge list of available works (most of them pillaged from the public domain), and to have everything then dead-end six or seven times in the "no can do" billboard -- this not only reaffirmed, it strengthened what I like to call my "techno-skeptic" position. Deciding that one sample book was as good as the next -- at least for the kinds of comparisons I would be doing -- I let it all go, contenting myself with Rocket eBook's freebie offering, already installed, and, as it turned out, perfect: Alice in Wonderland.

FIRST, THOUGH, LET ME get my raw response out. I did not especially like my e-book reading experiences. I am openly biased, yes. But I think if you made a generous allowance for negative predisposition I would still come out on the critical side of things. I don't mean here the various hassles and frustrations I experienced -- I mean the encounter itself. As a matter of face, the whole work of thinking out this piece has been trying to isolate precisely why this should be. What texts I was reading did not ultimately matter.

It was the process that was at issue. After giving both machines the benefit of the doubt, using them in various contexts -- in my favorite reading chair, outside in the yard, in bed at night with all the lights out -- I have a number of what seem to me strikingly obvious observations. Differences between products aside -- the Softbook opens to a flat 5 3/4" x 7 3/4" screen, while the Rocket eBook at 3" x 4 1/2" screen-size is more like a chunky paperback -- these observations apply to both.

My initial response, after some long minutes of reading and clicking, was to feel uneasy about the disappearance of context. The further in I read, the worse it got. Simply: I lost sight -- literally -- of where I had been, and had no real idea of how much further there was to go -- in the chapter, in the book. The thin bar indicator running along the right margin of the Rocket eBook did not really help, nor was clicking backward any sort of solution. I began to realize how much my reading of a book depends on my sense of being situated, and how much I flex and relax certain cognitive muscles depending on where I know myself to be in the paper text.

With the e-books, focus is removed to the section isolated on the screen and perhaps to the few residues remaining from the pages immediately preceding. The Alzheimer's effect, one might call it. Or more benignly, the cannabis effect. Which is why Alice in Wonderland, that ur-text of the mind-expanded '60s, makes such a perfect demo-model. For Alice too, proceeds by erasing the past at every moment, subsuming it entirely in every new adventure that develops. It has the logic of a dream -- it is a dream -- and so does this peculiarly linear reading mode, more than one would wish.

No context, then, and no sense of depth. I suddenly understood how important -- psychologically -- is our feeling of entering and working our way through a book. Reading as journey, reading as palpable accomplishment -- let's not underestimate these. The sensation of depth is secured, in some part at least, by the turning of real pages: the motion, slight though it is, helps to create immersion in a way that thumb clicks never can. When my wife tells me, "I'm in the middle of the new Barbara Kingsolver," she means it literally as well as figuratively.

CONFRONTING THE WORDS on the flat screen, I was aware that I was taking them in differently. By changing the medium of presentation, I was also changing the reception, giving the language less weight, less gravity. The sentences arrayed across the screen seem implicitly to belong to another realm. They were now part of the digital stream, and I read them as I read everything digital -- everything on a screen, at least -- in a reflexively more cursory (pun intended) way. Nor could I evade the terrible paradox -- that I had always cast book and screen as opposed, warring entities, and here was the book now entirely submerged in this strange host body. Could this really be the future?

Oddly there was also a sort of contrary momentum at work. I could not shake off the feeling that the device I held in my hand, the new-fangled reading machine, was underemployed. Even with its word-search and bookmarking and underlining functions, the fact that this sophisticated piece of engineering was simply delivering text seemed off. It was like running a car at walking pace. I had to quell my constant sense of "Is this all there is?" As though I had somehow expected the marriage of text and circuit to produce some exponentially enriched reading experience. Instead, it was not even on a par. My contact with the book was not improved and intensified, but vitiated. The fundamental mystery of the act -- the converting of signs to mental contents -- while not eliminated, was now more of a piece with the generally banal encounters we expect when we log on.

All that said, I found the little Rocket eBook more seductive to handle and more pleasurable to work. I liked the heft, the rounded-spine effect, and the lack of all but the most basic options. The print could be enlarged in a way that was hospitable to the eyes, though the larger the print the smaller the textual field, and the smaller the textual field, the more intensified the Alzheimer's effect. Another few increments of magnification and a book could be consumed as a kind of necklace of illuminated bits, a sentence at a time.

The larger field of the Softbook, though, to my way of reading, comes closer to simulating the computer screen, thereby infecting any literary text I might read with the virus of ephemerality. Many people who will use the Softbook, however, will not be dreaming over works of literature -- they will be carrying necessary printed matter in a fairly convenient and streamlined fashion.

And this, I believe, is where the future of these reading prostheses lies -- out of the home and away from the desk. I could imagine myself heading off for extended travels (right!), not wishing to fill my suitcase with books, instead filling my Rocket eBook to the brim with ten or so books. Then, maybe, I could ignore for a time the loss of all that context, and that ever-present feeling of looking at the glorious ocean through the porthole of a ship. But since I never have jaunts like that anymore, and since I couldn't transfer a document to save my soul, the point is moot. I'll stay with my slow machine, the one that runs without a power switch. When I see it across the room, waiting on the night table, it always looks somehow personal.

Sven Birkerts is the author of five books of essays, including, most recently Readings.