As an electronic device, it should be said, the Kindle is a complete bust. We all know what to look for now in consumer electronics, thanks (largely) to Steve Jobs, who with his Macs and iPods made high-design commodities of such extreme tactile pleasures that users have long reported desires to chew them, lick them, even copulate with them. No such urge possesses the Kindle user, who maintains a more formal relationship with his device, no matter how open-minded and forward-thinking he privately feels in owning one.

What’s most enjoyable about the Kindle are the books that take it over and how readily and inexpensively you can get them and read them. What’s not enjoyable is everything else: the bumpable buttons that constantly flip your pages and lose your place, the pointy and cruel keyboard that is stiff and ineffective, the lily-white casing that is ugly when new and dingy and gross when used.

Really, it’s terrible. How this prototype ever made it into production I don’t know. It’s as if its creators had never seen an iPhone. Or a Walkman, for that matter. Where have they been? And the Internet capability that the device offers (almost exclusively so you can download books and other reading material from Amazon) is so poor  its parameters so hard to determine, its browser so ungracious and inaccessible  that you’re discouraged from ever exploiting it.

At the same time, and you’d be justified in thinking I’m just seeking a silver lining to rationalize my homely new purchase (it cost $360, after all), there’s some way in which the Kindle’s weak Internet connection and elusive browser are the best parts of the machine. As I said, the Kindle feels insular and remote from the wild world of commerce and buzzing data swarms. But the fact that it’s connected to the Web sort of  it has to be, right? Or how else could I download all these books?  makes the Kindle somehow better than a book. Because while I like a few hours on an airplane, I can’t say I want to move into a locked library carrel and never visit the Internet again. And I like that the Kindle, which connects to the Web through some proprietary Amazon entity called a Whispernet, is not completely out of it. The Kindle acknowledges the Internet; it hears its clamorous demands. It just ignores those demands. For the user, this means the Kindle bestows on the contemporary reader the ultimate grace: it keeps the Internet at bay.

Download a good book  Marilynne Robinson’s “Home,” say  and the design flaws of the Kindle quickly become irrelevant. The buttons, the angles, the casing all recede  and I even lose the shopaholic part of my brain that cares about “casing” enough to learn the word for it. The Kindle circumvents the tech critic in all of us and finds (welcome back!) the long-neglected reader. With a gray screen that uses actual black ink that has been given an electric charge (wow), the Kindle does everything you long for from a book and everything you may have despaired of finding again.