E-Books: Try to read 'em and weep

Every time I write sceptically about "electronic books," I receive a few indignant e-mails from readers rhapsodizing about their fantastic recent experience reading "War and Peace" on their Blackberry or "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" on their cellphone screen. So this time spare me the grief, OK? I have tried out yet another e-book, and yet again Herr Gutenberg's half-a-millennium-old innovation stands the test of time.

Sony loaned me its $350 Sony Reader, which is showing up in stores now. Because I like to focus on the positive, let's say what's right about this latest attempt to digitize reading. The Reader is lightweight and fits into a man's suit pocket, as long as baggy suits stay in fashion. The reading screen, using technology by Cambridge-based E Ink Corp., is superb.

Problems arise when you actually want to read books. Sony's library has 10,000 titles. Bob Woodward? Yes. Doris Kearns Goodwin? No. Dan Brown? Yes. John Grisham? No. I wanted to read the just-announced Man Booker Prize-winning novel "The Inheritance of Loss." No dice. How about Jan Morris's much-praised "Oxford"? Nah. I paid $3.95 for Lytton Strachey's "The Eminent Victorians," with its unforgettable profile of the 19th-century educator Thomas Arnold, for whom "it was disquieting to learn that Unitarianism is becoming very prevalent in Boston."

But let's say you want to read one of the supposed 500,000 digital books available at many library sites on the Web. I easily downloaded "Plutarch's Lives," but because the Reader wouldn't let me enlarge the teensy type, it was unreadable. (A Sony engineer explained that I could have enlarged the Plutarch on my PC, and then transferred it to the Reader.)

Also, the Reader can't search in a text, the way the 1998 Softbook could. So instead of searching for "Alexander," it was a headache and a half to scroll through hundreds of pages looking for the chapter on the Macedonian conqueror. Sony vice president Ron Hawkins says search wasn't high on the list of priorities for readers of trade books: "We felt simplicity was the key."

There's more. My friend John Sedgwick sent me a copy of his forthcoming "In My Blood," as an Adobe Acrobat file. It loaded easily into the Reader, but again I couldn't enlarge the type to read it. I wanted to search for the hilarious episode in which one of his loony relatives sends a letter to every alumnus of the Groton School, warning that African-American students are about to take over the campus. (As if!) I found the anecdote, but only because I read the book on my computer, not Reader.

The bottom line? It's sweet, but it's not sweet enough.

Earlier this month, Jay Atkinson, a rough-and-tumble guy himself, used the phrase "Boston noir" to describe the inheritors of the George V. Higgins mantle: Dennis Lehane, Chuck Hogan, the loopy Michael MacDonald, Roland Merullo, and Richard Marinick. It so happens that Brooklyn-based Akashic Books has been churning out urban noir collections for several years, with titles like "Manhattan Noir," "Twin Cities Noir," "London Noir," and so on. Each book is a series of grim-ola short stories, selected by a well-known writer.

I dipped into "D.C. Noir" and "Brooklyn Noir," and the story quality was uneven. My clear favorite was "Chicago Noir," edited by Neal Pollack. There's a fictional letter written by Nathan Leopold, of the Leopold and Loeb child killing duo, from his real-life exile in Puerto Rico, that was especially morbid. Yes, they have plans for a "Boston Noir" collection. "Boston is plenty dark," says Akashic managing editor Johanna Ingalls, hoping to get the Hub version into print by 2008.

After I wrote a column hailing my success in not reading books, two authors sent me more books not to read. I have no intention of reading N.M. Kelby's comic novel "Whale Season," although I'll say the heads-up stud poker scene with Jesus ("Jesus bet the American Dream") was funny. The second book I didn't read, "A Thousand Bells at Noon," by Boston's own G. Franco Romagnol, has a funny description of a schoolboy game the author played, in which the city's trademark initials SPQR "(The Senate and People of Rome") stand for "Sono Porci Questi Romani": "These Romans Are Pigs."

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.