Free Range by Bill Whitehead for August 15, 2015

Of course, we were useless in the dark, easily damaged, and once a page was torn out, the information was irretrievable.

…And you were often (too often) BURNED!

Except when your appendix was removed.

And we had lawns to chase kids off of.

Actually, it is thanks to the monks that we have any copies of the classics—they were the ones that preserved the ancient libraries.

Most Bibles were copied onto new parchment, since making a copy on recycled materials would not have been acceptable.

We just lost pages, covers, and people borrowed us and never returned us.

Thanks, bmonk. I was about to make the same point. The monasteries preserved most of what literature from the ancient world we still possess.

I favor the tablet/phone, you can carry around a whole library of books, on something that weighs a fraction of what 1 book would weigh.