Paper didn't spread because people wanted it
The most boring material in your house has a backstory that flips how you'd assume technology usually works.
Paper began in China around the second century BCE, as a byproduct — mashed hemp fiber left in water, pressed into sheets almost by accident. By 105 CE, a court official named Cai Lun had turned that accident into a repeatable process: soak plant fiber, press it thin, dry it on a screen. Cheaper than silk, lighter than bamboo strips, and it caught on slowly, then everywhere.
What Mark Kurlansky argues in Paper is the more interesting part. We tend to assume new technology drives historical change — the tool arrives, and society reorganizes around it. Kurlansky flips the arrow: paper spread only where there was already a hungry demand for literacy, record-keeping, and religious or administrative texts. China had that demand first. The Islamic world, where papermaking was refined and where paper mills multiplied for centuries, had it next. Europe, oddly, came late — clinging to parchment and vellum long after cheaper paper was available elsewhere, because European institutions weren't yet organized around mass reading and writing.
The tool doesn't create the need. The need finds the tool, and then makes it better.
Which is a strange thing to learn from a material whose whole purpose is being unremarkable.