Dwarkesh Patel

The serial nature of a newspaper was a form of accountability that made people willing to trust it over time.

So the newspaper is a way of fact-checking the pamphlet.

The pamphlet is a way of making money while you're printing your longer book.

I will also let you have a look at papyrus.

So you can see the sort of plaid.

pattern of the papyrus because it is made of the two layers of strips.

And there's a papyrus scroll.

That's modern papyrus.

The thing about papyrus is that in addition to being cheap, it's very brittle.

It works better in a scroll than it does folded over because the folded edge cracks really easily.

So if you try to make this into a codex book, it's going to be very fragile as a codex book.

And then here you go.

This is a real 17th century letter in absolutely indecipherable handwriting.

In parchment?

In parchment.

You can even tell, because that's cheap parchment, which side was the outside of the animal and which side was the inside of the animal.

But here is good parchment.

That is hard to believe that it's animal skin.

So these are pages from a book of hours from about 1480.

And individually hand calligraphed.