Milestones in reading

The mid-4th-century Codex Sinaiticus is the earliest surviving copy of the Bible.  (Barry Iverson / St. Catherine’s Monastery, South Sinai, Egypt)

The Codex Sinaiticus is handwritten in Greek lettering on animal skin.  (Barry Iverson / St. Catherine’s Monastery, South Sinai, Egypt)

Jeff Bezos launches Amazon.com, an online bookstore.  (Andy Rogers / Associated Press)

Two companies, NuvoMedia and Softbook Press, release competing digital readers, the Rocket eBook and the Softbook. Martin Eberhard, co-founder and CEO of NuvoMedia, holds up the Rocket eBook at his office in Mountain View, Calif., in 1999.  (Paul Sakuma / Associated Press)

A scanner passes over a book at the University of Michigan, where librarians are helping Google create digital versions of all the estimated 50 million to 100 million books in the world.  (Carlos Osorio / Associated Press)

A Sony employee in Tokyo reads the Japanese novel “Botchan” by Soseki Natsume on the Librie electronic book reader in 2004.  (Shizuo Kambayashi / Associated Press)

The turning of pages is demonstrated on the new Apple iPad tablet computer.  (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)