Well, I guess the day had to come: one of the great print series, the Loeb Classical Library, has gone digital. Shed a tear in your ouzo, classicists, and anyone else for whom the Loeb Library held out its significant (and yet oh so restrained) red and green charms.

Harvard University Press, which publishes the Loebs, is launching the digital version of the series in fall 2014, but they’ve released screenshots of the series in development, as well an overview of its future features.

These include the usual advantages of digital texts: the ability to search the entire list with all kinds of relentlessly useful parameters; pixelated cornucopias of annotation, bookmarking, and sharing capabilities; and worst of all, the choice of different reading modes—you will, apparently, be able to toggle between single and dual-language modes, obviating forever the tactic of just pretending you already knew Greek and didn’t need to look at the lefthand pages.

In a video introducing the series, Sharmila Sen, executive editor-at-large for HUP, explains how very appropriate this new transition actually is, describing how the texts that make up the Loeb’s have “successfully made it through a series of technology upgrades, from oral to written text, from scroll to the codex, from manuscript to the printed page.”

And sure, maybe the digital Loeb fulfills James Loeb’s vision of making all the great and bawdy and monumental and sublimely beautiful works of the classical era available in an inexpensive, easy-to-use edition. But where will it end, I ask you?? When the Loebs go digital, what can you possibly use for stabilizing a badminton post or chucking at the head of your fellow Oxonian? Tablets don’t thwack the way a Loeb thwacks.

To be fair, this is going to be incredible: to take just one aspect of it, readers will be able to compare translations of words and passages across the entire 523-book series, which should turn up all kinds of interesting questions about different translations, perhaps especially over time. (Many of the Loeb translations were re-visited in the second half of the twentieth century, since early translations bowdlerized the dirty stuff.)

And the ability to search the series in deeper and different ways than just hiding out in your uncle’s library for the summer allowed may mean that lesser-known works surface, and new connections are possible.

Still, all us codex-heads are going to get a little sniffy in the fall, when the Loeb pages are succeeded by a lot of swiping and pinching. At least until we get to Ovid and his Ars Amatoria:

“Let wax pave the way for you, spread out on smooth tablets,
Let wax go before you as witness to your mind —“