When I first got an iPhone, I was thrilled to see the e-books and reading applications available and went a little download happy.

All of Shakespeare’s plays? Of course! Any bookshelf without them is barren. Joyce’s Ulysses? Well, why not? Perfect in a pinch . . . you know, for reference. Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown, one of the ur-texts of the age of electronic literature? What better way to read about the development of electronic bulletin boards and hacker culture in the 1980s? (Adding an ironic wrinkle for me was the fact that Sterling’s book focuses on AT&T’s efforts to police the net in its early days, and I had downloaded it via my AT&T cell phone. Have the hackers taken over from the inside, or just been co-opted?)

Outside of getting about 1/3 of the way through The Hacker Crackdown, a valiant attempt to re-read Coriolanus, and a quick run-through of the first few screens of “Telemachus,” I never got very far with these texts. It just seemed to be too difficult to read anything longer than an email or short news article on my favorite new gizmo. I began to think that I wouldn’t be swept up by the e-book craze, currently being kindled by new technological developments.

“It’s too hard to read a longer text on a small screen,” I thought, “and I love the sensation of opening a book, riffling its pages, sniffing the lovely combination of the odors of paper and binding glue as it wafts gently noseward.” The coldness of an electronic reader, the seemingly evanescent nature of books rendered as mere data, and other similar barriers hindered my initial ebullience from taking root and changing my reading patterns. (Some of you may also recall my analog tendencies.)

And then . . . and then . . . I discovered the Stanza reader and all the public domain e-books to which it offers unfettered access. Just like everyone, I like things that are cheap or free, so I started to explore their catalog.

Particularly exciting to me has been the availability of noir pulp fiction through Munseys. Over the last couple months, I’ve read — nay devoured — novel after novel by Charles Willeford, a pulp writer best known for Miami Blues, which was turned into a movie starring Alec Baldwin and Jennifer Jason Leigh, both sporting terrible haircuts.

Willeford’s later stuff, including Miami Blues and all the novels featuring his most famous character, Hoke Moseley, are not available on Munseys, due to their being copyright protected, but his wild, weird, creepy pulp novels from the 50s are.

These period covers misrepresent the plots and writing, but not by too much.

Willeford’s world is violent, male-dominated, and sexist, but his central characters are complex and nuanced. In The High Priest of California, Russell Haxby randomly attacks a stranger in a bar, then returns home to work on his long-term project, a line-by-line interpretation of Joyce’s Ulysses.

Willeford’s men are after power, money, and sex, but often have a private moral code to which they adhere almost monastically. Frank Mansfield, the narrator of Cockfighter (yep, cockfighter), holds himself to a vow of silence for years until he wins the highly prized “Cockfighter of the Year” award.

Whip Hand, originally credited to W. Franklin Sanders, but later discovered to have been authored by Willeford as Deliver Me from Dallas, is a Faulkner-esque triumph. Written from five or six different perspectives, each character with his or her own subtle, distinct voice and vision, it reads like a fully-realized, unmade Coen brothers movie. If Joel and Ethan haven’t read it, I’d be truly astonished. Willeford’s influence seems to be all over Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, and No Country for Old Men (both Cormac McCarthy’s book and the movie adaptation).

At first, I downloaded a couple of Willeford’s books out of curiosity, but reading them in (increasingly longer) snippets — commuting on the Metro, waiting in line at the grocery store, sitting on a plane — my relationship to my phone, and to reading, has changed.

Originally published as throwaway literature, these are the perfect novels to read in this new, disposable format. Willeford’s short sentences and snappy writing work very well on the small screen of the iPhone, and the gripping, bizarre plots and characters keep me riveted. The pulp has become pixels, but the spirit remains much the same. And I now see e-texts as just another format in which I can consume the written word. Printed books won’t disappear from my shelves, as vinyl hasn’t from my music collection, but e-books have found a place in my library.