The first books were basically sand.
Not a metaphor. The oldest writing we have — Mesopotamian cuneiform — was pressed into clay tablets. Clay is an aluminosilicate. The first page in human history was baked silicate mud.
Thousands of years later, someone learned to melt that same silica into glass, and grind it into a lens. Suddenly aging eyes could keep reading. The thing that saved reading for a lot of people was clarified sand.
And now you’re reading this on a screen run by a silicon chip — silicon, refined from silica, refined from sand.
The first book was sand. The device in your hand is sand. Everything in between was just us getting better at shaping it.