Medieval Control Over Information

The printing press was an important step towards the democratization of knowledge. Within fifty or sixty years of the invention of the printing press, the entire classical canon had been reprinted and widely promulgated throughout Europe (Eisenstein, 1969; 52). Now that more people had access to knowledge both new and old, more people could discuss these works. Furthermore, now that book production was a more commercial enterprise, the first copyright laws were passed to protect what we now would call intellectual property rights.

Old vs. New Media

Books' changes through time

This is how the Medieval Bible looked like:




This is how it looked after the printing revolution:



And that is one of the many ways the bible and various other books can be read nowadays:

The Printing Press

Let's take a look at Gutenberg's hard work:

The Greatest Invention Ever

Did you know that printing with 

wooden made types were used 

in the East since the 8th century?

The Origins of Printing Press

Gutenberg: I'm Not The Movable Type

The Revolution Beggins

It was the beginning of the 19th century. 

Manuscripts and hand copied books started to be replaced by printed ones. 

A revolution was ongoing. 

The era of the hand press came to a 

close after the invention of the printing machine. 

Before the invention of the printing press and the consequent printing revolution, books were really rare and expensive.

Over medieval times, every word of every page of every text or book, was copied individually by the scribes, often monks. These men labored for up to a year in the copy of a single book, usually written in Latin:

At that time, few people were able to read. Not only because of the lack of education, but thanks to the lack of texts and books as well. Only priests, monks and part of the elite had access to books and to its messages.

In order to print the first printed books, there had to be faced not only technical dificulties, but prejudice as well.Printed Books were not as "special" or "unique" as hand copied ones. That's the reason why the first printing machines of Europe tey to imitate the apearence of hand written books. 

These machines had small blocks called types. The printer arranges the types according to the text to be printed within a frame on a press and then prints a page of writing. 

Around the 1440, Gutenberg devised a printing press that could print many copies in just a small fraction of time. His machine was an adaptation of a coin-maker’s punch to make a mold for casting types.

Types were now made of metal instead od wood and could be use in the printing process over and over again.

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein calls the "communication shift" this transition in Western Europe from a scribal culture to one of print. For the time that a monastic scribe would have taken to produce a manuscript, a post-Gutenberg printer could produce too many copies of the same. This fact contributed to increase the dissemination of texts, the number of "literati" members, as well as possibilities for cross-cultural interchanges in printing shops.