What do books look like in ancient rome?

Books in ancient Rome were scrolls. They were read by unrolling and rerolling the read portion. If it were a large book, such as the Iliad, it would be on more than one scroll. These multi volume books/scrolls were stored together in a leather bucket. Each scroll had a tagged spindle indicating its title and location if in a public library.

The Romans also pioneered the bound book, which eventually completely replaced the scroll. They called it codex (plural codices). To start with they tied together wax covered tablets of wood to make notebooks. Later sheets of papyrus or parchment were used. Julius Caesar may have been the first to reduce scrolls to bound pages in a notebook and maybe even in a full papyrus codex. At the turn of the 1st century AD, a folded parchment notebook became widely used for taking notes or to record copies of letters. The number of bound pages increased to a full size codex. By 300 AD the codex was as common as the scroll and later completely replaced it. Of course, these books were manuscripts (hand written). The replacement of the scroll by the codex has been seen as the most important advance in the history of the book before the invention of printing.