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The difference between our time and Gutenberg’s is, of course, the rate of change. It took almost half a century for the alphabetical index to become a standard; Arabic page numbers were not adopted until the 1500s. There were feature wars in the new platform of the book, but salvos were fired only every 20 years. It may have taken a long time, but when all those features coalesced into the system of citation, indices, page numbers, footnotes, bibliographies and cross-references that we now take for granted, they helped usher in the scientific revolutions of the modern age. Entire ways of interacting with information became possible because we had agreed on how to describe where the information lived and how to point people towards it.

This is a story with a direct connection to our current situation. This year is the 20th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee’s world wide web specification. The defining property of that standard was this: it established a way to describe where information lives and how to point people to it. The extraordinary run of innovation seen on the web starts with the breakthrough of web addresses and links. For two decades, this new universe of linkable data expanded faster than any other form of information. But this year, for the first time in my adult life, unlinkable information began growing at a meaningful clip.

Where links abound, a rich ecosystem of commentary, archiving, social sharing and scholarship usually develops because links make it far easier to build on and connect ideas from around the web. But right now, books exist outside this universe. There is no standardised way to link to a page of a digital book.

The Internet is burning up with speculation about Apple Inc.'s plans for an “iPad,” a potential new entrant in the e-reader market of low-power digital devices whose displays approach paper quality.

E-readers' adoption is still tiny – just 1.5 per cent of American consumers own one, and fewer in Canada – but Ms. Rotman Epps believes these gadgets will change our reading habits while throwing several industries into turmoil.

According to her research, book publishers are where music publishers were in 2001 when the iPod launched: