This is one of the most interesting and well-rounded microhistory books I've ever read. Seriously, just read it.
The book itself is a total 5 star read full of interesting facts about paper and a hundred other topics that relate to paper throughout history. I never considered all the different aspects of its history and how it relates to so many aspects of society. There are notes on economy, war, religion, art, politics, and a tons of other things that kept me interested from chapter to chapter.
The audiobook, however, is just 3 stars because the narrator was putting me to sleep with the super slow and measured pace of his reading. I was actually considering dropping the audiobook and looking up a physical copy until I realized that upping the speed to 1.5x made him actually sound like a human being that is interested in what he's reading.

I was once a fan of Mark Kurlansky and still admire his voice and approach. But with each successive book the editing and structure grows worse and I think this will be the last that I read.

Paper is full of interesting information but barely readable. It repeats and contradicts itself endlessly, goes off on single sentence tangents (not the lovely chapter long tangents of Kurlansky's best work), and utterly fails to address technology (mechanical or digital) with any reasonable comprehension.

The best parts of this book are in the middle, which is focused on linguistics. The opening is a mess and the ending simply botches all of the machine explanations.

The introduction/preface is wonderful and covers the main themes perfectly. These are: To a first approximation, Jews, Chinese, Arabs, Muslims, and perhaps native Americans invented every pre-industrial technology centuries before Europeans. Technologies arise from cultural and societal need rather than appearing and shaping culture around them. Paper is a lovely and fascinating product intertwined with many industries and with a very complicated environmental history and present impact.

This book on paper contains an incredible amount of valuable information. Its only drawback is that it was incredibly tedious for me to navigate through the book, which is unusual for a Kurlansky book. "But there is one truly unique human trait: people record their deeds, their emotions, their thoughts, and their ideas....they have an impulse to record almost everything that enters their minds and to save it for future generations. And it is this urge that lead to the invention of paper." (page 15 of 409)

Like Kurlansky's other books on a commodity, this ends up being a full spectrum tour of human communications, religion, art and commerce, centered around the material culture of paper. There is nothing new here, but with a global sweep, Kurlansky explains how, depending on your material (mulberry bark, cotton, wood pulp, papyrus) and your purpose (shoji screens, scrolls, sketchpad, bureaucratic forms), you get different ends, with artifact lives of their own.

I love Kurlansky's work, and his subjects. Great to learn so much about the history of paper.

It was ok. I liked hearing about the earliest histories - about how writing was developed. There were a few weird opinionated comments dropped in that didn't really belong but they were few enough. They included a lot about printing techniques like wood cuts, etching, various plates, which was interesting from a technical point of view but they completely neglected discussion of printing from a computer. No dot matrix, Xerox, inkjet, nothing.