How did the printing press fundamentally change the economics of knowledge compared to handwritten texts?
It reduced the cost of knowledge distribution by a factor of thousands.
Prior to Johannes Gutenberg's invention around 1440 CE, the replication of texts was a slow, expensive process reliant on manual copying, which introduced errors and kept books scarce and exclusive. The printing press, utilizing mechanical movable type, industrialized this process. While writing represented a reduction in the cost of *storing* knowledge outside the mind, the printing press achieved massive leverage by drastically cutting the cost of *distributing* that stored knowledge. This massive reduction in distribution cost democratized access to information, fueling major societal shifts like the Reformation and accelerating the Scientific Revolution by making education and specialized expertise available to vastly broader segments of society.
