The rise and fall of page numbers

How important is the page number? It is a small thing, and we often read often overlook the page numbers of our texts. Yet page numbers are a relatively new invention.

A long time ago (a very long time ago), knowledge was passed on through the oral tradition, with scholars memorizing and speaking. There was no writing (and therefore no pages or page numbers).

A long time ago (not quite as long as the age of memorization) we humans started writing. We quickly developed parchment and the dominant form was the scroll -- a long piece of parchment that was rolled.

In the first century B.C.E. the codex gained popularity. Instead of a single scroll of parchment, the codex consisted of a set of flat pages. Often made of papyrus, it had the virtue of being two-sided. One could write on both sides of the papyrus. (One could write on both sides of a scroll, but it was not practical.)

Page numbers were introduced in the sixteenth century B.C.E., to aid in cross-referencing documents.

That's a long time for a new concept to arise, especially to our twenty-first century treadmill of new products.

But back to page numbers. E-readers -- a twenty-first century doodad -- make life difficult for page numbers.

It is not pages that lead to the invention of page numbers, but pages with consistent text that make page numbers useful. Every time you refer to the page, the text must be the same as the time before. Without this consistency, page numbers are useless.

E-readers break that consistency. While different editions of a book might use different layouts (and therefore different page numbering), once a printed book was printed, the page numbers stayed put. But e-readers play by a different set of rules. They allow for different sizes of text, so the "pages" they present on their displays change. A document of ten pages in small typeface may be twenty pages in a larger typeface.

Page assignments in printed books are static; page assignments on e-readers are dynamic. Or in the current programmer lingo, printed books use early binding for page numbers and e-readers use late binding. ("Binding" in the "assignment" sense and not the "leaves and signatures into a folio" sense.)

Interesting, this problem did not arise with word processors. I suspect that is because word processors are used more for composition and less for reading, while e-readers are used primarily (if not solely) for reading. Wordstar, Wordperfect, and Microsoft Word are all quite good at assigning page numbers, mostly as an afterthought. For the author, page numbers are nothing more than a bit of stuff that is tacked on at the end.

I suspect that we will see the demise of page numbers. Their original purpose -- cross referencing -- is really a matter of marking destinations within the text, and we can do that with hypertext links and other techniques. Page numbers were a compromise, the best that was possible with the technology of the day, a hack that happened to work.

We still need the ability to refer to specific locations within texts. With other techniques, we can drop page numbers. Oh, I expect that they will stick around for a while. As long as we use printed documents for reference we will need page numbers. I expect a new class of completely on-line information to use pageless (or page-number-less) formats.

While page numbers will disappear, the two structures that currently depend on them (tables of contents and indices) will remain. These are useful, and they will change into structures that can get us quickly to the desired place of the document. They will do it without page numbers, though.