I couldn't think of where to publish it, so I sent it to Asimov's Science Fiction , where it appeared as a guest editorial. Hari Seldon lied to you. Truth really is, as they say, stranger and more convoluted than fiction. In the middle ages, cloth was made from hand-spun flax. Sometime in the mid thirteenth century, however, the spinning wheel, invented in China, was introduced in Europe.
Paper is a relatively new invention.
Before paper, books were made from parchment. You make parchment from the skin of a lamb. Making a single vellum Bible in the middle ages required the skins of two to three hundred lambs. But with the introduction of rag-stock paper, invention of the printing press swiftly followed. Cheap paper lead to literacy.