Both books and photographs have undergone major ontological reevaluations brought about by digital technologies. Carol Armstrong's Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843 - 1875 (1998), tracks the emergence of the photograph into the book format, from something that was graphically and materially foreign to the book, to something that now appears natural to it, merged with the page itself. While N. Katherine Hayles has analysed the implications of digital technologies on the materiality of books as their physicality becomes increasingly predicated on electronic binary code. In light of Armstrong's argument, Hayles' work also has relevance to the photograph. Armstrong makes much of the photograph's apparently inherent "indexicality", which she sees as the essence of its material difference to images printed in text, in spite of the fact that printed text is an index of its matrix. The difference is, of course, that it is nature that is seen as the matrix of the photographic "print". What does it mean then, when both photographs and books come to share the same coded materiality of the screen? In Writing Machines (2002) Hayles locates materiality not in the physical structure of the object but rather in the temporal moment of the human experience of it. Given the fundamentally different spatio-temporal experiences of the digital book and the digital photograph, the role of code can be seen as something other than the reductive, standardising material logic that many theorists of the image feared it to be. This paper explores the impact of Hayles' definition of materiality on ontological theories of photography and text and the way in which they can be seen to inform each other.