Paper and Parchment: The Bookworm Monopoly
Ancient Egypt pioneered the creation of paper through the soft, fibrous pith of the papyrus plant, a reed that grows on the banks of the Nile.
Greeks called the plant papyros or Byblos, after a city famous for it, hence the words paper, bible, bibliography, and many other words stemming from those roots.
We tend to think of papyrus-based paper as rather coarse-woven stuff, slices of plant material laid down in a crisscross pattern like a straw mat. That's often what you see in museums like the British Museum's scroll of the Book of the Dead. It's also what tourists buy when modern Egyptian painters sell them replicas of ancient Egyptian art painted onto modern papyrus-based paper.
However, the Egyptians refined the paper-making process much more, and had relatively smooth white paper for their business accounts, letters, and books. Books were scrolls, of course: rolled up and easy to store on spools and/or in pigeonholes and canisters.
When Alexander the Great conquered Egypt around 330 BCE, the Greeks (Macedonians, really) moved in and took over the paper trade. They saw right away the wisdom in the Egyptian's policy of keeping the paper-making process a secret. Papyrus-made paper was exported all over the Mediterranean, but the process of creating it -- and the raw materials -- were an important and lucrative monopoly.
Alexander's general Ptolemy founded a dynasty of Greek-blooded pharaohs in Egypt after Alexander died, and part of their power was based on control of the paper trade. One of the early Ptolemies (they all seem to be named Ptolemy for the boys and Cleopatra or Berenice for the girls) sponsored the building of the Library of Alexandria. Alexandria was an important port, and information technology was power even back then, so having a good library of world literature and knowledge was a valuable (if new) asset. The Library of Alexandria grew because any ships that put into port were required to let Alexandrian scribes copy all books and manuscripts on board. Sometimes the canny librarians sent back the copies and kept the originals!
The Library of Alexandria's holdings were always changing, depending on when manuscripts were loaned out and lost in various minor mishaps (Caesar wasn't the only one blamed for burning part of the collection, probably some being kept in warehouses by the docks), or what new books were being added to the collection. Scholars lived in Alexandria too, adding treatises on math, geometry, science, astronomy, geography, and grammar.
So the Library of Alexandria was justly famous, and the government helped keep it so by regulating the export of paper. Anyone who wanted to use this valuable IT, or the knowledge stored in Alexandria, had to go through Egypt.
That is, until Pergamum broke the monopoly.
Pergamum was another of the great states emerging from the collapse of Alexander's empire after his death. It, too, tried to build a gigantic library to rival Alexandria's. Just one problem: Alexandria was being grabby about paper, and didn't want the competition. So the scribes at Pergamum had to invent a new medium to get around the monopoly.
Their solution? Smack the heck out of calfskin and treat it in various ways to make a strong, flat white writing surface called Pergamena charta, what we now call parchment.
Parchment could be folded and sewn together along a spine, then cut. It couldn't be woven into incredibly long rolls like paper could. So parchment was bound into codices, which is the shape we usually think of nowadays when we mean book.
Books keep changing shapes -- you've probably seen a few online that never touched real paper, and have never been printed! The materials books are printed on (or displayed on) constantly evolve.
