"About 2,000 years ago, people used scrolls. That's how they recorded information. The Romans tore the scrolls apart, and binded the pages together as books," Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie said in an interview. "Books are much easier to handle than scrolls."

Lie has authored a proposed extension for CSS, called (GCPM), which, if standardized and implemented in browsers, would give browsers the ability to do e-reader-like navigation.

This week, Lie met with publishers in New York, pitching the standard as an easier and lower-cost alternative to building and maintaining dedicated e-readers. Next week he'll meet with other CSS designers at the W3C Technical Plenary / Advisory Committee Meetings Week, taking place in Santa Clara, California, to discuss folding this set of specifications into the upcoming version 3 of CSS.

Opera itself , and a downloadable Opera Reader that mimics the functionality of a browser supporting this extension.

Today, many text-based Web pages, including probably this news story, are formatted as a single column of text. Lengthy texts may be divided across multiple Web pages, with a "next page" button at the bottom of each. If the text fills up more than a single browser screen, the browser provides a scroll bar to move up and down the page.