A lot of printed media was released in poorly bound booklets, without covers, it was roughly equivalent to a tweet or blog post today. The good ones got reprinted and/or compiled into an anthology, the bad ones were simply lost to time as kindling for the hearth.

Not as fast as a tweet, but low cost, sub-book media has existed as long as the printing press was around. The classic books we study today are the equivalent of the criterion collection dvd sets.