The travels of Marco Polo(1300) talks about books in China so cheap that people could actually buy them as they are made from woodblocks.<p>But "cheap" here is not the price of a book today. A book requires someone spending at least a year writing it, specially in the past, with very bad lighting after sunset or in bad weather. That usually meant a book costing the equivalent of a car today, or even more expensive.<p>Chinese books were cheap compared to buying a car but way more expensive than today. And very few books could justify the investment of creating the woodblocks.<p>Gutenberg probably got the idea from Marco Polo,woodblock was already used for graphics in Europe, but added his knowledge with metal working and invented an alloy that expands as it cools down. That is extremely rare in metals, almost all of them contract.<p>That unique property gave Gutenberg type its incredible quality.<p>Also, Gutenberg knowledge of metal made him create a method that let you recreate the type very easily again and again when the type wears out.<p>And then he added the concept of the press and the distributor of ink that were taken from other professions like olive oil and wine makers(something as old as Romans in Europe).
This article missed the point. Gutenberg didn't invent metal movable type and that's not why we remember him. He invented making a repeatable casting method with appropriate alloys for metal type that had accurate enough uniform dimensions that he could to use a wine press mechanism to press paper onto the uniform surface.<p>The molding method he made was astounding clever and went far beyond using basically metal coin minting process that has existed for thousands of years around the world.
The timing is interesting. According to the article, one of the reasons this did not succeed more broadly was due to the large number of characters in the script adapted from the chinese writing system. The invention of Hangual a couple of centuries later did bring to Korea a script with dozens of letters instead of thousands. If the modern script was invented first, perhaps we would be crediting Korea as the birthplace of the printing press.<p>edit:fixed typo
I liked the article, but it's mistaken in its use of named centuries. It says "In the 12th century, the Mongol ruler Genghis Khan consolidated the largest empire in human history", but instead means the 1200s, which is the 13th century. (Recall the years 1-99 are the first century though the year numbers don't start in the 100s.) This mistake happens a few times in the article, but at least its consistent.
I have been workshopping a theory that the printing press was far more valuable in the West due to the small number of characters needed for printing the Latin alphabet compared with Chinese characters.<p>I'm admittedly unfamiliar with pre-modern Chinese printing techniques, though. Is my theory plausible or am I way off base?
- Uyghurs were Manichaeans too<p>- pretty sure the neighboring Tangut (Western Xia) had printed books too (maybe courtesy of the Uyghurs?) <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auspicious_Tantra_of_All-Reaching_Union" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auspicious_Tantra_of_All-Rea...</a>