Milestones in reading

Marilyn Lundberg, an associate with the West Semitic Research Project, holds a 4,000-year-old tablet deciphered by a process called reflectance transformation imagery at USC’s Ahmanson Center. Through the imagery process Lundberg is able to see that the tablet is written in a Sumerian language and lists laborers. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

March 9, 2014 7:01 PM PT

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)

2002: Google begins scanning world's books.

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)

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Milestones in reading

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