The emerging Arabic-Islamic book culture of the third/ninth century affected — among many other disciplines of knowledge — even the most oral of Arabic arts: poetry. Poets improvised more often with the aid of writing, poems were exchanged by letter or on inscribed objects, and writing itself, its tools, techniques, and expertise figured more prominently within the repertoire of poetic motifs. These trends were supported by the introduction, at the end of the second/eighth century, of a cheap and abundant writing material, namely paper, as well as by the growth of secretarial handbooks and poetic manuals, which placed the knowhow of written composition at the disposal of a growing public, largely constituted by the urban elite. The question is not so much the newness of the written format, as other supports of writing (papyrus and vellum) had existed, and the paper codex, notebook and letter were adopted almost immediately after their introduction to Iraq, as their ubiquitous mention in contemporary sources shows. Rather, the distribution among the various old and new modes, consulting books vs. memory, or writing vs. speaking, are of interest. The same holds true for the different purposes for which the modes were used, whether for short term or long term storage, for wide dissemination or to reach a small limited audience; and finally, which were the society’s attitudes to the old and new media? As (recently translated) scholarship by Gregor Schoeler has shown, we are dealing not with a unidirectional shift from the oral to the written, but a coexistence of, and alternation among, several options (not unlike the variety of Internet culture). The present paper offers a preliminary survey of attitudes to media in records of the literary life from the late second/eighth and third/ninth centuries.