Why was western printing superior to Asian printing?

One thing that doesn&#x27;t get mentioned often is that the West had a &quot;simpler&quot; alphabet of 26 characters, 10 numbers, and a few punctuation marks (~20). Ok, add uppercase, and you&#x27;re still at about 80 individual, distinct characters.<p>Chinese or Korean, on the other hand, needed many more characters. Creating the movable types for them was not an easy feat. Certainly more difficult than with the German equivalent.<p>In particular for Korea: Hangul [0], which is a &quot;simpler&quot; language that gradually took over Hanja [1] in Korea, was &quot;created&quot; only in the 15th century, not before. Earlier than that, even if Korea has the equivalent of &quot;printing&quot;, the complexity of it was higher than the one experienced with the west alphabet.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Origin_of_Hangul" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Origin_of_Hangul</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hanja" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hanja</a>

<i>We like to think of Johannes Gutenberg as inventor of the printing press and movable type in 1450. Yet, the first movable type got invented in China around 1040 by Bi Sheng. The types were made from porcelain material. Later wooden movable types were developed...</i><p>on wikipedia if you look up &quot;movable type&quot; you see a big discussion of the earlier work in China and Korea before moving on to Gutenberg.<p>if you look up &quot;printing press&quot; you get the Gutenberg story only, including that Gutenberg discovered an alloy for his type that was so good it remained unchanged for hundreds of years.<p>conflating movable type with printing press is a big mistake for this type of analysis, and that&#x27;s before getting to the out of the box simplicity of movable type for alphabets a few dozen characters long vs the vocabulary required for Chinese writing.<p>(I happened to look this up the other day just to get the date that mass printing started in Europe, and I started with movable type so I had already recently discovered all the above points)

Watt had a model steam engine, with a glass cylinder, but couldn&#x27;t scale it up in iron or steel. When he tried, there was a gap of up to an inch between the piston and cylinder, he had no way of filling the gap. It was when Wilkinson came along and used his new boring machine to make a precision cylinder that Watt was able to complete his engine. There are a lot of things that had to precede Watt&#x27;s success.<p>In the same way, there are a lot of details that tend to get ignored in the Gutenberg as Great Man narrative. They did get enumerated, and it&#x27;s important to keep those details in mind as they were the decisive factor, and Gutenberg was just the hacker who managed to successfully combine them in an effective manner.

Calling Gutenberg a James Watt to Chinese printing press designs is... questionable. Afaik he was not aware of Chinese&#x2F;Korean designs that he could have improved upon. Also, the Chinese designs arguably weren&#x27;t presses, since they rubbed paper against a type - the screw was one of the many important innovations by Gutenberg. The article would benefit from focusing less on the &quot;race&quot; between Europe and China (which arguably wasn&#x27;t one, but two largely separate developments) and more on the technology.

These bar charts are confusing.<p><i>Development in Book Prices and Productivity</i><p>Pages printed per day: Europe<p>Cheapest book: biggest bar<p>The years go forward but you want to read it backwards to understand it&#x27;s meaning.<p><i>Size of Largest Book Collection</i><p>no y axis, just text written on random bars. big year gaps that don&#x27;t really add to the narrative.<p>I get you&#x27;re retelling the paragraph you wrote before in a visual format. It&#x27;s hard to read and doesn&#x27;t add much.

Flawed premise IMHO. Printing is a tool which evolved to keep pace with the sophistication of the societies using&#x2F;developing it. The Southern Song dynasty came close to an industrial age, but was held back by a belief system (confucianism) that privileges cushy stability over ruthless progress. This, in part, prevented the emergence of a product-and-service-hungry bourgeoisie. The level of technological progress of a society is mostly determined by its culture.

I suspect only needing to learn a dozen alphanumeric characters vs hundreds&#x2F;thousands of unique characters also helped literacy

Let’s not forget Aldus Manutius. His orders of magnitude cheaper books than Gutenberg made books available to regular people. He can be seen as inventor of paperback books. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Aldus_Manutius" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Aldus_Manutius</a>

Overlooked in the article: the Yuan&#x2F;Song invention of movable types made of tin, which melts at low temperatures similar to that of Gutenberg&#x27;s type metals. But they didnt catch on due to the poor ink adsorption.<p>Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;publisher&#x2F;content?id=d__HBAAAQBAJ&amp;hl=zh-CN&amp;pg=PA218&amp;img=1&amp;zoom=3&amp;sig=ACfU3U0R0DmpMVsBSl4UMXSi2NGoEOzYdw&amp;w=1280" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;publisher&#x2F;content?id=d__HBAAA...</a>

There was an article publisher here a while back discussing that Chinese progress was limited due to not having invented glass so scholars ability to remain productive after their 40s was diminished due to the lack of reading glasses, perhaps this was a factor as well.

As others have said it seems obvious dealing with about two dozen characters well adapted for engraving is easier than dealing with several thousand (at least) more complicated characters.

I&#x27;m surprised this doesn&#x27;t mention Mongolians or Kublai Khan anywhere, as they ruled China at the time and were the ones who introduced Asian printing techniques to Europeans in the first place, and allowed Gutenberg to make his first printing press.

The reason europe succeeded, was mostly internal competition. A million thiefdoms, preying up one another (mostly in germany, italy and the balcans) with some economic save heavens (great britain, the netherlands) this was basically a free market of rulers. If a ruler did not cut it, the micro-nation would fall behind and be gobbled up.<p>If a ruler was against a invention, you would pack up, move into the town behind the next hill were some upstart youngster would welcome the new things - because he had a expansion planned.<p>So fierce competition and wars destroy entrenched interests and landlords of stagnating stability (church, guilds, etc.). To push inventions, one need - in a civilized manner, recreate those conditions.

Author here, sorry about the paywall, I am trying to experiment with different ways of growing my readership and subscribers. You can get past the paywall by signing up for a 7-day free trial. It can be canceled at any time. If this really rubs you the way then I am making this draft link of the whole article available for a limited time: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;erikexamines.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;bc1449ba-7e0d-43b6-8d53-8fe4aa21e8a7" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;erikexamines.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;bc1449ba-7e0d-43b6-8d53-...</a><p>Some of the questions popping up here regarding significance of different components of the Gutenberg invention is addressed in a linked article:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;erikexamines.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;why-was-the-printing-press-not-invented" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;erikexamines.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;why-was-the-printing-pre...</a><p>This discusses technologies existing in Europe at the time but not in China, which Gutenberg could leverage to create his printing system.<p>To clarify the point here isn&#x27;t to suggest a civilization or society is superior to another. It is a discussion about printing systems, not people or languages.

Glaring paywall in the article obscuring the actual statement&#x2F;conclusion aside, I recommend reading &quot;The Chinese Typewriter : A History&quot; by Thomas S. Mullaney (ISBN 9780262536103). The book covers a lot about Chinese language(s) adaptation to an Information Age crisis brought by technologies based on primarily Western&#x2F;Latin alphabets, and how some of these adaptations paved the way for Chinese language&#x27;s integration into the information technology world of today.<p>I recommend approaching these topics without predetermined judgement on whether a language is inherently superior or inferior. Such biases are the last things we need in today&#x27;s world full of division and tribalism.

The article isn&#x27;t bad, but why is the title so needlessly antagonistic?

&gt; Books got 60 times cheaper in 50 years<p>I&#x27;m always confused by this wording. Does this mean that the new price was 1&#x2F;60th the original?

It&#x27;s a strange article. The author conflates &#x27;printing press&#x27; and &#x27;movable type&#x27; in the second paragraph, but then admits that the printing press in Asia wasn&#x27;t a machine at all and was entirely manual. The innovation was not in producing the type plate, but in automating the production of printed pages.

Was it? As late as the 18th century, European visitors to China kept remarking on how cheap books were there and how many people had them.<p>Movable type was suitable for the Greek and Latin alphabets, but not for Chinese characters or Arabic flowing script. The Chinese had great success with woodblock printing.

Chinese usually gives the same information with shorter text. Those who play TAS [1] usually switch language to Chinese so that the dialogs could be skipped with the shortest time. And ancient written Chinese 文言文 is even shorter. So I may argue that we don&#x27;t have that much to print.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tool-assisted_speedrun" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tool-assisted_speedrun</a>

it probably didn&#x27;t hurt that the whole culture was centered around a book

Paper had been around in the Mediterranean since the late Bronze Age thanks to the Egyptians

TLDR: China beat Gutenberg to movable type but Gutenberg beat everyone else to a printing press.