One interesting I've noticed in older books is that instead of page numbers (which are sort of like indices in an array), they used a system of writing the first word of the recto (right page) at the bottom right corner of the verso (left page) creating a linked list of sorts.
I worked on page number extraction for a large online retailer. There were some amazing places they could be located. Stacked numbers indicating location in book/section/chapter, middle of the outside margin, mixed up based on if it was a title page or main body page.
It looks like a focus problem. Click or select something in the page, like a word of text, and then scrolling with the keyboard works (at least for me on Firefox and Chrome on OS X).
(Instead of clicking, hitting tab once worked for me also)
You can see some examples in this book https://archive.org/details/opticksortreatis1730newt (although it has page numbers too).