Interesting thing about your point on books.... there was a Nova episode this year about paper and books that explained something in a way I had never heard.
During the Roman empire, books were not expensive. Well, not like they were later in the European "dark ages". Later in Europe, before the printing press, books were bespoke items, handcrafted at great expense. They were only available to the wealthy.
But a thousand years earlier, books (scrolls) were relatively cheap, sold at books stores and available from libraries. What happened?
Well, Nova had experts on talking about paper. The papyrus paper that was used in Egypt and Rome was smooth. The writing used was easy and flowed quickly on the slick paper. It made the job of copying a book fast - therefore the product was cheaper.
But with the collapse of parts of the Roman empire, access to papyrus was cut off.
So Europe switched to parchment, made from animal skins. It does not slide easily. Writing became slow, and letters changed to the block form familiar in medieval texts, because that careful printing was dictated by the type of paper used.
This took books out of the hands of any but the wealthy, significantly slowing the spread of information.
But it also had an advantage later. When it came time to invent moveable type, the font was already block and uniform. Hence the Guttenberg bible. Meanwhile, Arabic was developed on papyrus, which is slick and encourages a long, flowing hand. Developing a convincing typeface for this was exceedingly difficult, and printed copies of the Koran failed to catch on. They argue that this explains the Islamic world falling behind Europe.... the lack of a viable printing press business.
Really worth a watch.