The replacement of the scroll by the codex shows that the law of progress affects also the type of support used for texts. A technology of writing which is better suited to the communication of ideas will necessarily replace the former one. The question today is to determine whether the new digital environment will take over the book or if a way of reading perfectly suited to the book, like the one needed for reading a novel, will fade away and slowly disappear.

Various formats of print other than the book are circulating today, such as the newspaper and the magazine. Nevertheless, all these formats share the same characteristic : they consist of pages through which one can flip.

The book is mainly associated with the novel, a genre that gained a wide acceptance one century after Gutenberg and which came to be seen as the epitome of literature. The novel requires a “reading pact” with the reader characterized by its totality and its continuity. A continuous reading of the book, following the order set by the author, is a precondition for the reader to experience the satisfaction promised by the novel and to eventually arrive at a better understanding of life, himself or the society.

Very different from the book, the newspaper asks for a completely different reading pact. The reader may scan the titles and catch just a few sentences of an article before going to another one, much like a bee going from one flower to another. This way of reading is encouraged by the organisation of the articles (the so-called inverted pyramid), the numerous subtitles and the disposition by columns on the page.

The magazine elicits still a different reading pact. Its format is better suited to a continuous reading than the newspaper, but it is still possible for the reader to flip through a variety of subjects, in search of something of interest.

Although these formats have existed for almost two centuries, the magazine is presently winning a greater part of the time devoted to reading, at the expense of the novel.

The arrival of the WWW has created a new situation. With its rapidly growing mass of information on any subject, the Web is the apotheosis of the Book, the ultimate library.

This new library, however, is not built upon the book but upon the database model, which elicits its own textual organization. When assembling a database, one does not try to keep the readers continuously reading, but to answer their questions as effectively as possible. The tabular disposition of the various fields of the database on the screen allows the reader to select the exact piece of information desired. Very often, the best databases are a mix of bits of information and small narratives related to them. For example, a big database like All Movie Guide offers for each movie a plot synopsis, a review of the movie, a biography of the director and the actors, as well as links to other related movies. This mode of organization encourages a way of reading that is very focused, although limited in the time spent continuously on a same subject. And it does not exclude the serendipity generally associated with literary works.

The newspaper and the magazine migrated very easily to this environment while the novel has resisted. Various reasons oppose the reading pact of the novel migrating easily to the screen.

i. The book consists of a foliated space which allows the copresence of the pages that have been read and those still to be read. It provides the readers with an analog mark signalling their position in the totality of the text.
ii. Pagination gives a digital mark to the same effect. It allows the reader to finely tune the time dedicated to reading.
iii. The text is printed without all the lateral distractions of a web page, which eliminates the temptation to zap out at any moment.
iv. The dedication of the reader is facilitated by the extraordinary handiness of the book.

In order to display a text on a screen, one has to choose between two possibilities : either vertical scrolling, which goes back to the old age of the volumen, or the lateral flip of virtual pages. The scrolling is not adequate for a long text because it does not allow the readers to manage their time nor to easily find the place where they stopped at a previous session. The lateral flip takes away the illusion of the presence of the previous pages. This inconvenience can be compensated by various visual metaphors. One of these is to reproduce on the screen a digital clone of the printed page, as they did with the e-book.

The ideal solution would be an object like the codex, with multiple pages of a flexible material that could be read in any position without the necessity of a backlight and consuming a very small amount of energy.

This object is on its way, with the technology being developed by E ink Corporation. They have already designed a material which is half the thickness of a credit card. Some big publishers have a partnership with that company.

With this kind of digital codex, the book would be born again as a complex tool able to combine the functions of a book, a personal computer, a personal digital assistant and a writing tablet. The digital codex would allow our society to get out of the schizophrenic situation in which we are today, where the works most patiently researched, written and edited are divorced from the medium that could give them the greatest audience and circulation, a medium that embodies today the very ideal of the book as a vehicle to communicate from mind to mind through time and space.