The brilliant technology of the book

Technological innovation is frequently accompanied by excitable rhetoric and totally false prophecy. So it was with printing in the fifteenth century. . . .

. . .

The book survives because it is an object of technological genius, refined through two millennia since the Romans decided that there must be a better way of storing information than on scrolls of papyrus.

Andrew Pettegree, "The Renaissance Library and the Challenge of Print," in Alice Crawford, ed., The Meaning of the Library (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2015), pp. 86-87