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The Printing Press and the Knowledge Revolution — Ideas Spread

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Opening: How Long It Takes to Copy One Book

Imagine you are a monk in medieval Europe. Your task is to copy out a Bible by hand. Dipping a quill in ink, one letter at a time, one line at a time. This work took not weeks but months, sometimes more than a year.

Picture the scene for a moment. In the cold workroom of a monastery, under a dim candle, one person silently transfers letter after letter. Even as his hand grows numb and his eyes blur, he spends the day in the same posture. Only after many months is a single book at last complete. The amount we now copy in mere seconds, a person of old made with a piece of their life.

So books were enormously expensive. The price of a single book could rival that of a fine house or a small farm. A book was power and property, and knowledge sat in the hands of a tiny few.

There are scenes that show how precious books were in this age.

  • Libraries sometimes chained books to the desks so they would not be stolen.
  • To borrow a book, one sometimes had to leave another valuable item as collateral.
  • It was common for many people to pass a single book around, and to read it aloud to one another.

Then, at a certain moment, it became possible to print the same book quickly in hundreds, in thousands of copies. The arrival of printing. This change was not simply about making books cheaper. It changed the speed at which ideas spread, and as a result it became the start of a vast revolution that shook religion, science, and society as a whole.

In this essay we look at how printing arose, how it changed the world, and how that change resembles the digital information age we live in today.

We want to focus on one thing in particular: printing was not a mere old technology but the first vast "information revolution" humanity ever experienced. Printing showed the first case of how the world changes when copying cost drops dramatically. And that pattern, astonishingly, deeply resembles the change we undergo today.

The Age of Copying: A World Where Knowledge Was Locked Away

Before printing, the only way to make a book was to copy it by hand. We call this manuscript copying. In Europe it was done mainly by monks in monastery scriptoria.

Copying was more than mere transcription. The monks not only transferred letters but also adorned the openings of books with beautiful pictures and decorations. So some manuscripts were works of art in themselves. But that took yet more time and care, and books grew all the more precious.

The world of hand-copying was slow and narrow.

  • Cost: making a single book consumed vast amounts of time and material (parchment, ink, and so on).
  • Scarcity: only one copy could be made at a time, so the number of books was absolutely small.
  • Errors: because humans copied, mistakes crept in, and copying a copy let errors pile up.
  • Labor: completing a single book required the long labor of several people.
  • Storage: precious books were carefully kept in special places and could not be handled freely.

The problem of accumulating errors was more serious than one might think. Copy a book made a century earlier, then copy that copy, and you could end up with a manuscript quite different from the original. Sorting out which copy was closest to the truth was itself a great task for scholars.

In such a world, knowledge was a privilege. Those who owned books, those who could read, held authority. Even with a new idea, there was effectively no way to spread it widely. Moving a thought from one person's head into another's took immense time and cost.

Consider the speed of knowledge transmission in this age.

  • Suppose some scholar made an important discovery.
  • Even if it was written down, copying it took a long time.
  • For that copy to reach a scholar in another region took still more time.
  • And in the meantime, the content could shift little by little in the copying.

In such an environment, it took decades, sometimes more than a generation, for one person's good idea to change the world. Knowledge was like a stream flowing slowly down a narrow alley.

Printing in East Asia: Woodblock and Metal Type

When we say "printing," we often think first of Europe's Gutenberg. But the history of printing began far earlier in East Asia.

First there was woodblock printing. A whole block of text is carved into a wooden plate, inked, and pressed onto paper. East Asia printed books such as Buddhist scriptures by woodblock from early on.

Korea's Tripitaka Koreana, which carved a vast body of Buddhist scripture into woodblocks, is a representative example, famed for its scale and precision. Carving letter after letter into tens of thousands of woodblocks, this work shows the peak of the printing technology and devotion of the time. That those blocks are well preserved even today speaks to how meticulously the work was done.

Woodblock and type printing each had strengths and weaknesses.

  • A woodblock, once carved, could print the same book for a long time, favoring books in steady demand.
  • Type was convenient for setting new books, favoring the publishing of diverse works.
  • But Chinese-character type came in so many kinds that making and managing it cost a great deal.

Woodblock printing had limits. Each kind of book required carving an entirely new set of blocks, and the blocks were difficult to store and manage. So came type printing: making each letter separately, selecting them as needed to compose a page, printing, then scattering the type to be reassembled next time.

Metal type in particular matters. Goryeo is well known for leaving early examples of metal-type printing. Among surviving metal-type imprints, the "Jikji" (the Jikji Simche Yojeol) is recognized as the world's oldest extant book printed with movable metal type, and it is inscribed in the UNESCO Memory of the World register. This predates Gutenberg.

That said, whether East Asia's metal-type printing led straight to an explosive change shaking all of society is a slightly different matter. Chinese characters number so many that thousands or tens of thousands of types had to be made, and printing was led mainly by large institutions such as the state or temples. The technical feat and its social impact should be viewed separately.

This point is very important, because "who invented it first" and "how much that invention changed society" are different questions. East Asia's metal type is plainly a great technical achievement of humanity. At the same time, for that technology to lead to a change shaking all of society, several conditions — script, institutions, demand — had to interlock. We will return to this story in more detail later.

Gutenberg's Revolution

In the mid-fifteenth century, the German Johannes Gutenberg created a printing system using metal type. The key is less that he first invented type than that he combined several elements into one efficient system.

Great inventions often take this form. Rather than making something wholly new from nothing, they fit together pieces that already existed, exquisitely, into one powerful tool. Gutenberg's achievement was exactly of that kind.

The strength of Gutenberg's printing lay in how its parts interlocked.

  • Metal type: the alphabet has few letters, so with just dozens of type sorts one could compose almost any book.
  • The press: a machine inspired by the wine press, it pressed the type plate evenly onto paper.
  • Ink: an oil-based ink that adhered well to metal type and printed sharply on paper.

Thanks to this combination, books could be printed fast, consistently, and relatively cheaply. The Bible Gutenberg printed (commonly the "Gutenberg Bible") became a symbol of the age of print. This Bible is still highly valued today for the beauty of its precise printing and is regarded as a monument in the history of human printing.

The condition of the alphabet was decisive. On a phonetic system with few letters, metal type reached its full power. Comparing this with the Chinese-character environment of East Asia helps explain why type printing spread so quickly across society in Europe.

Briefly sketching how a book was made in Gutenberg's print shop:

  • First, you select the type for each letter and set a line, then a page.
  • You spread ink evenly over the set type plate.
  • You lay paper over it and press it with the press.
  • Once printed, you scatter the type to reuse when setting the next page.

Compared with copying one letter at a time by hand, this process was incomparably faster, because once a page was set, you could print the same page identically by the hundreds.

The Chain Reaction Printing Set Off

The true meaning of printing does not stop at cheaper books. As books multiplied, chain reactions of change broke out across society.

It was rather like a small spark falling onto a dry field. When the spark of printing fell, the tensions and desires that had built up in society began all at once to blaze. It is no accident that great changes arose almost simultaneously in many domains — religion, science, education.

We will look in turn at three representative changes: the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the rise of literacy. These three may look separate, but all grew from one root: that ideas could now spread quickly.

The Reformation

In the early sixteenth century, Martin Luther put forward writings criticizing the practices of the church of the day (arguments commonly known as the Ninety-Five Theses). What might once have ended as a local dispute was, thanks to printing, rapidly printed and spread across Germany and on into Europe.

Luther also translated the Bible into the language ordinary people spoke. The printed vernacular Bible spread the idea that "anyone can read the Bible directly, without going through the church's interpretation."

The meaning of this change was by no means small.

  • Before, only clergy who knew Latin could read the Bible directly.
  • Once the vernacular Bible was printed, more people could read and interpret the Bible for themselves.
  • This led to a fundamental question about where religious authority lies.

The Reformation was not a mere theological dispute but a vast social movement that arose in combination with the new medium of print. Many historians hold that without printing, the Reformation could hardly have spread so fast and so far. The Reformation shows dramatically what happens when new ideas meet a new medium.

The Scientific Revolution

Printing greatly affected science as well. Before print, a scholar's discovery took a long time to reach another scholar, and diagrams or figures could be distorted in copying.

Printing sharply reduced this problem. Accurate diagrams and observational data were reproduced identically and reached scholars in many places at once.

In science, the power of printing shone especially in these ways.

  • Sharing accurate images: precise drawings of plants, the human body, and the heavens were reproduced without distortion, so observed results could be compared together.
  • Trust in figures and tables: astronomical observation tables and calculation tables were reproduced exactly, so another scholar could continue research on their basis.
  • Fast verification and rebuttal: when a new claim was printed and spread, other scholars could examine it and rebut or develop it.

The achievements running from Copernicus through Galileo to Newton could be rapidly shared, tested, and developed through print. That many people could read and debate the same book identically was one foundation for the explosive growth of modern science.

Science is, in essence, an activity of "verifying together, many people." One person's claim develops as it is confirmed, rebutted, and refined by others. Printing was exactly the key tool that made this process of "verifying together" possible.

Literacy and the Vernacular

As books became common, the number of people who could read grew too. Not only scholars' languages such as Latin, but books in the vernacular that people used in daily life, were printed in great numbers. This drew more people into reading and, over the long run, led to advances in education and literacy.

There is also a view that the shared experience of reading books in the same language helped scattered people develop a sense that "we are one group who speak the same tongue." Printing took part not only in the formation of knowledge but in the formation of identity.

The rise of literacy happened slowly but steadily.

  • At first, many learned letters in order to read religious books.
  • Gradually more people read books for practical knowledge and for pleasure too.
  • As readers grew, a virtuous cycle arose in which more books were made.

When there is more to read, the motive to learn letters grows; when more people know letters, more books are made again. Printing fastened the first button of this virtuous cycle.

Comparing the Age of Copying and the Age of Print

Aspect           Age of copying        Age of print
------------    -------------------   -------------------
Method           copied one by hand    many at once by type
Speed            very slow             fast
Price            very expensive        gradually cheaper
Errors           arise with each copy  same plate reproduces identically
Knowledge        concentrated in few   gradually widely spread
Pace of change   slow                  quickening

The core this table shows is that printing did not merely make "more books" but fundamentally changed "the speed and reach with which ideas spread."

East Asia and Europe: Same Technology, Different Results

Here an interesting question arises. East Asia made metal type earlier, so why did the explosive change that shook society stand out more in Europe?

This is not merely a matter of "who was first" but a good case showing that a technology's impact on society depends on many conditions.

First, there was the difference of script.

  • Chinese characters number in the thousands and tens of thousands. That many types had to be made.
  • The alphabet has few letters, so with dozens of types one could compose almost any book.
  • This difference greatly affected the efficiency and speed of spread of type printing.

Next, the agent of printing differed.

  • In East Asia, large institutions such as the state or temples often led printing.
  • In Europe, private printers were relatively active.
  • Competition among private printers became the driving force for quickly publishing diverse books.

Finally, there was a difference in social demand. An explosive demand for "writings to be read widely," as in the Reformation, appeared strongly in Europe at a particular time. As this demand meshed with printing, change was amplified.

In short, technology alone does not change society. Depending on what script, what institutions, and what demand it meets, the result differs greatly. The cases of East Asia and Europe show well how complex the relationship of technology and society is.

Printing and Standardization: The Same Book, Identically

Among the changes printing brought, one often overlooked is standardization.

In the age of copying, even the same book differed slightly with each copyist. Letters dropped out, were miscopied, or diagrams went awry. So determining "which copy is correct" was itself a great task of scholarship.

Printing greatly changed this problem.

  • Books printed from the same plate were identical down to the last letter.
  • People in far-apart places could read exactly the same content.
  • Diagrams, maps, and figures were reproduced identically too.

The power of this "sameness" is greater than one might think, because scholars in many regions could now lay out exactly the same book and debate it. Conversations like "look at page 23 of your book" became possible. Standardized texts fundamentally changed the way knowledge accumulates and is verified.

Who Controls Information: A History of Censorship

Among the changes printing brought, one not to be left out is the struggle over censorship.

As ideas spread quickly, those in power grew anxious. They wished to stop ideas unfavorable to them from being printed and spread. So various forms of censorship appeared in many societies.

  • Publication licensing: a system requiring the prior permission of power before a book could be issued.
  • Lists of banned books: lists were made of books forbidden to read or to publish.
  • Punishment after the fact: a way of punishing printed matter issued without permission.

Censorship was an attempt to block the flow of information, but it was hard to succeed perfectly, because once printing began to spread, it was not easy to stop. Sometimes a banned book stirred even greater curiosity and was read all the more widely in secret.

This struggle shows the tension between "the free flow of information" and "power that tries to control it." Interestingly, this very tension repeats today in debates over the internet and platforms.

The New Jobs Printing Created

Printing also created new jobs and professions. It shows well how one technology changes the very structure of society.

  • Printers: skilled specialists who set type and operated the press appeared.
  • Publishers: people emerged who decided which books to issue, put up the funds, and took charge of sales.
  • Proofreaders: people specializing in correcting errors before printing became necessary.
  • Booksellers: merchants who bought and sold printed books increased.

Gathering together, these gradually formed an industry: publishing. As books became goods that were traded and distributed beyond mere objects, the production and spread of knowledge grew ever more organized and specialized.

As books multiplied, the meaning of the "author" also changed. Who wrote a book came to matter, and publishing under one's own name became common. As time passed, the idea of protecting a writer's rights also grew.

The Everyday Scenes Printing Changed

No less than the great events (the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution), printing slowly changed people's ordinary daily lives too.

  • Calendars and almanacs: practical printed matter holding farming times, seasonal divisions, and weather forecasts spread and helped people plan their lives.
  • The rise of practical books: practical knowledge such as recipes, medical common sense, etiquette, and how to write letters was bound into books and spread.
  • Maps and navigation guides: accurately reproduced maps and navigational information aided exploration and trade.
  • Advertisements and flyers: printing was used in commerce too. Printed matter advertising goods began to appear.

In this way printing seeped into not only great thought but every corner of ordinary life — cooking a meal, finding the way, doing business. Great revolutions are often made of such small changes piling up.

How the Shape of the Book Was Refined

As printing became widespread, the shape of the "book" as we know it grew more refined too. Many features of the book we now take for granted are in fact inventions developed over a long time.

  • Page numbers: let you point to roughly where in the book something is.
  • Table of contents: shows the whole structure of the book at a glance.
  • Index: lets you quickly find a desired topic.
  • Title page: gathers the book's title, author, and publication information in one place.

What these devices have in common is that they are "technologies for quickly finding and organizing information." As books became common, beyond merely reading, "efficiently finding the needed part" came to matter.

Interestingly, this is essentially the same concern as the search, hyperlinks, and bookmarks of today's digital age. The principle that when information multiplies you need tools to organize it well and find it quickly holds across the ages.

A Quick Quiz: How Much Do You Know About Printing

Let us lightly check what we have covered. Try answering the questions below yourself, then match them against the explanations.

Question 1. What book is recognized as the world's oldest extant book printed with movable metal type?

Question 2. Why was the condition of the alphabet favorable for Gutenberg printing to spread quickly in Europe?

Question 3. What role did printing play in letting the Reformation spread so quickly?

Now the explanations.

Explanation 1. Goryeo's "Jikji" (the Jikji Simche Yojeol). A metal-type imprint predating Gutenberg, it is inscribed in the UNESCO Memory of the World register.

Explanation 2. Because the alphabet has few letters, with only dozens of type sorts one could compose almost any book. The situation differed from the Chinese-character environment with its vast number of letters.

Explanation 3. Because Luther's arguments and the vernacular Bible were quickly printed and spread widely, a local dispute could spread into a movement across all of Europe.

If you got all three right, you understand the core of printing well.

Curious Facts

The history of printing holds many amusing episodes that make you nod.

  • Incunabula: There is a special name for books printed in the earliest era of printing, roughly up to the end of the fifteenth century. From the Latin for "cradle," they are called incunabula — books from printing's "cradle period."
  • The journey of the Jikji: The surviving copy of the "Jikji," counted as the world's oldest book printed with movable metal type, is today held in a library in France. The story of how a single book traveled a long road to be recognized as humanity's documentary heritage is itself a piece of history.
  • The shape of a book: Many features of the book as we know it — page numbers, tables of contents, indexes — were also refined as printing and reading became widespread. The technology of finding information quickly is itself an invention of the age of print.

When One Book Shakes the World

The change printing brought can be summed up in one phrase: "a single book could now shake the world."

In the age of copying, even the greatest idea was hard to spread widely. But in the age of print, a single book could be reproduced in thousands of copies and reach many people's hands in a short time.

Once this became possible, a book became more than a vessel of knowledge — it became a force that moved society.

  • A book holding a new idea changed people's thinking.
  • A book holding a scientific discovery changed the way the world was understood.
  • A book holding social criticism sometimes became the fuse of change.

Of course, not every book changed the world. Most books were quietly read and forgotten. But among them, a few books, fitted with the wings of print, became vast forces that changed an age.

This is true today as well. We often witness how a single piece of writing or a single video spreads in an instant and shakes the world. The medium has changed, but the principle of "the power of a single widely spread message" is no different from the age of print.

Information Overload: An Old Worry

Today we often say "there is too much information." It is a complaint that, amid the endless flood of news, videos, and writing, we do not know what to look at.

Yet this worry in fact already began in the age of printing. As books suddenly multiplied, people of that time felt a similar difficulty.

  • There were too many books to read, but time was limited.
  • It grew ever harder to sort out which books were trustworthy.
  • It was not easy to find what really mattered amid the flood of information.

So people began to think of new ways to handle information.

  • Digests and encyclopedias: attempts appeared to organize vast knowledge and gather it in one place.
  • Classification and catalogs: books were divided by subject and cataloged to be found easily.
  • Reviews and recommendations: writings that evaluated and guided which books were worth reading increased.

All these efforts show that when information multiplies, what is needed is not more information but "the ability to choose and organize information well." The worry people had five hundred years ago carries straight over to us today, living amid a flood of information.

The Questions Printing Left Us

Following the history of printing, we have clearly seen one thing: when the way ideas spread changes, the world changes.

  • As books grew cheap, more people gained access to knowledge.
  • Reading the same book together, a new sense of community grew.
  • Religion, science, and politics were all greatly shaken in combination with the new medium of print.

And all those changes carried both light and shadow together. Printing spread truth while also spreading falsehood; it connected people while also dividing them.

This double-sidedness is a feature common to any powerful information technology. The tool itself is neither good nor evil. The result differs by how we use it, and by how we judge amid the flood of information it creates.

Printing Was the First Information Revolution

Today we live in an age where information explodes through the internet and smartphones. Yet looking closely, we find that many features of the digital information revolution we now experience already showed their prototype in the age of print.

Print revolution               Digital revolution
--------------------------   --------------------------
copying cost drops sharply     copying cost approaches zero
ideas spread fast and far      information instantly worldwide
threshold to knowledge lowers  anyone can be a sender of information
false information spreads too   fake information spreads fast
power tries to control media   debates over platforms and censorship

Seen this way, printing can be called the first large-scale information revolution humanity ever experienced. The moment copying cost dropped dramatically, ideas spread explosively, and as a result the power structure of society and the distribution of knowledge were thoroughly shaken — a pattern that repeats even today. To understand the history of printing is also to hold a mirror to the digital age we now live in.

Looking a little closer, between the two revolutions there are as many differences as resemblances.

  • A difference of speed: printing changed society over decades, but the digital revolution is changing the world in mere years.
  • A difference of direction: print was largely a structure of "the few make, the many read," while the digital is closer to "anyone makes, anyone reads."
  • A difference of scale: print spread by region or by nation, but digital information spreads worldwide in an instant.

But the core principle is the same: when the cost of reproducing and spreading information drops dramatically, society is shaken whole. The lesson printing teaches applies directly to understanding the change we now undergo.

In particular, the history of printing also hands us a warning. When information multiplies explosively, sorting out truth from falsehood within it grows that much harder. Just as false information and agitation spread alongside truth in the age of print, the same problem appears on a larger scale in the digital age too.

Closing: Something to Ponder

The history of printing is a story about "how ideas spread." The move from a world where copying one book took a year to a world that quickly printed thousands of the same book transformed humanity's intellectual landscape entirely.

This change, beyond merely more books, made us ask again whose knowledge it is. As knowledge once monopolized by a few flowed to more people, the very shape of society changed.

Now, beyond print, we live in an age where one person's thought reaches the other side of the globe in mere seconds. So these questions are worth chewing on.

  • When the cost of spreading information approaches zero, what happens to a society?
  • In an age where anyone can be a sender, why does the ability to sort out what to believe become more important?
  • Just as printing changed religion and science, what part of us is today's information revolution changing?
  • In an age overflowing with information, what is the ability we truly need?
  • When a new information technology arises, how should we look at its light and shadow together?

Printing may look like an invention of the distant past, but the questions it raised are startlingly present. The lesson that the world changes when the way ideas spread changes holds as true now as it did six hundred years ago.

From a world where a monk copied one book over a year, to a world where one person's thought circles the globe in mere seconds. This long journey gathers, in the end, into a single question: how shall we use this powerful tool wisely? The history of printing quietly tells us that we must find that answer for ourselves.

References

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