This article focuses on the issue of materiality in picture books – both in printed texts and in digital forms – and the relationship between those two. The research conducted, informed by Segolen Le Men’s work, wishes to reassess the definition of the picture book to take into account a mode of reading largely based on de-sacralisation. Picture books are shaken, torn apart, defaced, read upside down, or inside out by readers who are not familiar at this stage with the practice of reading. Picture books experiments with the book and thereby teach the reader to appropriate the book, not just as an object, but as a text. The article also questions the ability of digital picture books to integrate fully this act of defacing that plays such an important part in the reader’s development.