At the turn of the 20th century, Octave Uzanne and Alphonse Allais respectively write a fiction which depicts the death of printing and its replacement by a new medium. In this way, and half a century later, they recreate the famous chapter of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame entitled “This will kill that”. The two texts draw on a group of contemporary technical innovations to imagine the future transformations of media. Simultaneously, they shed a new light on an analogy which is part and parcel of the ongoing discourse: the spread of printed documents is often compared to a “flood”. The story of that substitution, along with the discourse on the proliferation of paper, may be considered as an element which participates in the establishment of new emerging media at that time.