TOEFL — Reading

The printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440, transformed European society in ways few technologies have matched. Before its arrival, books were copied by hand. A single volume could take a monk an entire year to finish, so libraries held only dozens of books and literacy stayed confined to clergy and the wealthy. Printed books were far cheaper: within fifty years, presses across Europe had produced millions of volumes. This sudden abundance of texts fueled the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. New ideas that once traveled slowly by word of mouth could now cross a continent in months. Historians therefore call the press the first true mass medium. The press also changed how knowledge was checked. Hand-copied texts accumulated errors as scribes duplicated one another, while printed editions could be corrected once and reissued. Scholars in different cities could finally cite the same page numbers, which made disagreement productive. The technology spread fast enough that licensing, censorship, and copyright followed within a century of the first press. Printing did not merely spread ideas faster; it made them stable enough to argue about precisely.