The article tries to describe the long "readers' century", i.e. the XXth Century. It starts up with two "postcards", that prove to be two typical reading patterns. The first one shows a self-taught reader, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, standing next to a booth of second-hand books, among the crowd, enraptured by books. The second one portrays the reading in the background of the Escalonia's hedges and of the Virginia Woolf's Room of One's Own. The history of reading in the XXth Century and the dangerous liaison between reading and modernity spring out from these patterns. Today, while we click on an eBook, perhaps this way of reading is shutting down; but another one, which is unrolled like a scroll and is read like a videogame, is just starting.