Books- The Last Chapter ?.

With the Fall of the Roman Empire widespread urban literacy and book production largely ceased.The market for books and the public and private libraries which bought them from the producers all went out of existence during the religious upheavals and barbarian invasions which overwhelmed the Western Empire.Eventually the only large scale body of literate men and women were the priests and nuns of the Christian Church. Surprisingly at this time a technological revolution  occurred which created the format of the physical book we know today. The volumen or scroll of the Greeks and Romans was replaced with the bound leaf book with its pages.This is obviously a lot easier to navigate around with new inventions such as numbered pages,chapters and the index.Unfortunately the production of such books was small by Roman standards limited by the small number of literate scribes within the population and also the fact that the books were produced on parchment and vellum.Parchment and vellum are produced from costly animal skins unlike the cheaper mass produced papyrus scrolls of the Roman Empire.Book production of Latin texts took place  in the scriptoriums of monasteries in Western Europe.In the Byzantine Empire the heir to the Eastern Roman Empire copies of Greek texts continued to be produced.A massive amount of the literature the ancient world simply disappeared during these centuries. To quote just one example Sophocles one of the fathers of Western theater wrote 123 plays of which only 7 survive.Imagine if we only had half a dozen of Shakespeare's 30 odd plays.It seems works often survived merely by chance.As well as the monasteries of Western Europe and the Byzantine Empire another repository for ancient texts was the Islamic world which often translated them into Arabic.The truly erudite medieval scholar as well as learning Latin ,Greek and Hebrew(for the scriptures) would also learn Arabic.The literature of the ancient world was in many cases a buried treasure accessible to only a tiny minority.Medieval European scholars knew Aristotle because they had Latin translations of him but Plato and Homer they knew only by reputation because the original Greek texts  had been lost.Some books such as those by Vitruvius on architecture survived because of their practical use,medieval architects were able to use them to build the towns,ecclesiastical buildings and palaces which were required.Eventually the medieval world produced its own literature,Petrarch ,Dante Chaucer and Malory are names that come to mind.This was small compared to the legacy of the ancient world.C S Lewis has pointed  out that there was  a prejudice of the medieval mind against literary innovation..Why invent new stories when the old ones are so much better. All this would seem to be an unpromising setting for the revolution in communication which eventually occurred.