| Sumario: | In a Norwegian comedy sketch posted on YouTube, a fur-collared tech guy from a medieval ''help desk'' comes to the rescue of a monk confronted with a bewildering new machine, the book. Did you try to open it? the tech guy asks. Yes, says the monk, but I was afraid the words would disappear if I turned the page. Don't worry, the tech guy reassures him. The only way the words will disappear is if you set the whole thing on fire. The sketch is as anachronistic as it is funny. The codex has been the dominant text format since late antiquity, and the modern paperback -- compact, portable, inexpensive, reasonably water-resistant -- remains the most efficient reading machine ever invented. Still, the dream of a truly revolutionary reading device has been around since long before the Kindle or the iPad. And if you're searching for a godfather of the reading machine, you might look past Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs to a nearly forgotten early-20th-century writer and impresario named Bob Brown.
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