Chinese and later Arab society contributed a crucial innovation to the development of the library with the art of making paper. In East Asia, sheets of paper were made from plant fibres, like bamboo, and used for both scrolls and codices. This technology spread during the first millennia to the Islamic world, where textile rags became the common resource with which to produce paper. The manufacture of paper was far cheaper and more efficient than the production of parchment from animal skins: all that paper-mills required were a steady supply of linen, cotton or hemp rags and a source of running water to power the hammers that reduced the rags to pulp.

Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen, The Library- A Fragile Hist…, loc. 163