When were the first books made?
Egyptian scribes wrote on papery scrolls made from strips of papyrus, a reedy plant that grew by the Nile. True paper was a Chinese invention of around AD 100, and was made originally from a variety of materials, including pulped tree bark, hemp, old rags and fishing nets. Ancient China also gave the world the surviving printed book, a Buddhist scripture printed from woodblocks in AD 868. In Europe, most books were copied by hand until the 1440s, and were rare and expensive. By 1500, thanks to Gutenberg's invention, cheap books were being printed in their thousand all across Europe.