Anonymous Monk,
That is because in scalar context, the angle bracket operator (see also readline) uses $/ (see perlvar) to return a single line. To get it to read the entire file, simply undef it (locally of course).

my $page;
{
    local $/;
    open(my $fh, '<', $file) or die $!;
    $page = <$fh>;
}
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