Reflecting on what can be found “beyond the book”, this article focuses on the multimodal children's novel Escape from the Temple of Laughter which was published in the mid-1990s. Viewed as both a container and a place of writing, this novel is a book with very porous borders whose content has literally escaped from it, thus avoiding the totalizing control of the codex. At the time of publication, even before the Web 2.0 existed, Escape from the Temple of Laughter was already a hypertext. The book is now being digitalized and the second part of this article questions the meaning of this re-contextualization. Is it really an attempt to go “beyond the book”, or is it simply an alternative means of dissemination? Does digitalization add something new to the text, or does it highlight some of the features that were already present in its print form?