The printing revolution occurred when the spread of the printing press facilitated the wide circulation of information and ideas, a process that Eisenstein termed an "agent of change" in the societies that it reached. Its consequences included the mass production of books, shifts in reading habits and the relationship between authors and texts, the decline of Latin as the language of scholarship, and new economic patterns in the book trade.
Mass production and spread in Europe , Germany The invention of mechanical movable type printing led to a rapid increase of printing activities across Europe within only a few decades. Demand for bibles and other religious literature was one of the main drivers of the very rapid initial expansion of printing. From a single print shop in Mainz, Germany, printing had spread to around 270 cities in Central, Western and Eastern Europe by the end of the 15th century. As early as 1480, there were printers active in 110 different places in Germany, Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, England, Bohemia and Poland. The historians
Lucien Febvre and
Henri-Jean Martin conclude that by this date the printed book was in universal use in Europe. In Italy, a center of early printing, print shops had been established in 77 cities and towns by 1500. At the end of the following century, 151 locations in Italy had seen at one time printing activities, with a total of nearly three thousand printers known to be active. Despite this proliferation, printing centers soon emerged; thus, one third of the Italian printers published in
Venice. By 1500, the printing presses in operation throughout Western Europe had already produced more than twenty million copies. In the following century, their output rose tenfold to an estimated 150 to 200 million copies. European printing presses of around 1600 were capable of producing between 1,500 and 3,600 impressions per workday. By comparison,
Far Eastern printing, where the back of the paper was manually rubbed to the page, did not exceed an output of forty pages per day. The commercial possibilities of the new technology were demonstrated by individual sales figures: of
Erasmus's work, at least 750,000 copies were sold during his lifetime alone (1469–1536). In the early days of the Reformation, the revolutionary potential of bulk printing took princes and
papacy alike by surprise. In 1518 and 1519,
Martin Luther became Europe's most published author; his 45 original works, written in both Latin and German, were reprinted by printers across Germany and reached a total of 291 editions. Many were short pamphlets of eight pages or fewer, which could be produced cheaply and distributed quickly. In the period from 1518 to 1524, the publication of books in Germany alone skyrocketed sevenfold; between 1518 and 1520, Luther's tracts were distributed in 300,000 printed copies. The Catholic Church responded by seeking to control the circulation of printed material; it established the
Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1559, and secular governments introduced licensing systems to regulate what could be printed. Printed literature later played a major role in rallying support, and opposition, during the lead-up to the
English Civil War, and later still the
American and
French Revolutions through newspapers, pamphlets and bulletins. The rapidity of typographical text production, as well as the sharp fall in unit costs, led to the issuing of the first newspapers (see
Relation), which provided a new means of conveying up-to-date information to the public. Pettegree argues that the market for printed news grew directly out of the Reformation: printers who had built a readership through Luther's pamphlets sustained it by producing news sheets covering battles, natural disasters, and public affairs. These news pamphlets closely resembled the Reformation
Flugschriften in format, typically running to four or eight pages in quarto. In the early seventeenth century, a German publisher began issuing bulletins of news on a regular schedule, creating the first weekly newspaper; the format spread through German cities and remained the principal news medium of northern Europe for over a century. Surviving pre-16th century print works, known as
incunable, are collected by many of the libraries in Europe and North America.
Global spread Beyond Europe, the printing press spread primarily through colonial and missionary networks.
Jesuit missionaries established the first press in Asia at
Goa in 1556, where João de Bustamante served as the first printer; the press had originally been intended for Abyssinia but remained in Goa after the patriarch-designate was persuaded to stay during a stopover. The Portuguese Jesuit
Diogo de Mesquita acquired a press during a visit to Europe in 1586 and established it at
Nagasaki, where it produced ecclesiastical works in Japanese until his death in 1614. In the Philippines, the
Dominicans set up the first press, which published the
Doctrina Christiana in 1593. In the
Ottoman Empire, non-Muslim communities operated presses from an early date:
Sephardi Jews established a Hebrew press in
Constantinople in 1493, followed by an Armenian press in 1567 and a Greek press in 1627. The first press to print in Arabic script for a Muslim readership was established by
İbrahim Müteferrika in 1729, producing seventeen works before 1742. In the Americas, the printer
Juan Pablos established the first press in
Mexico City in 1539, working on behalf of the Seville-based publisher Juan Cromberger; a press was established in the British colonies at
Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1638.
Circulation of information and ideas , commemorating Gutenberg's invention on the occasion of the
2006 World Cup in Germany The printing press changed the relationship between authors and their texts. Because each copy of a printed edition was identical, it became possible for the first time to cite references precisely, and the identity and exact wording of an author mattered in ways it had not when scribal copies of the same work varied between cities. For many works produced before the printing press, the name of the author has been entirely lost. The consistency of the printed page also encouraged the adoption of page numbering,
tables of contents and
indices as standard features of books, though all three had existed in some manuscript traditions. Reading habits shifted in parallel. Eisenstein describes a gradual transition "from a hearing public to a reading public" as printed texts, cheaper and more widely available than manuscripts, encouraged silent and private reading over the communal oral recitation that had been common in medieval settings. Over the following two centuries, the wider availability of printed material contributed to a rise in adult literacy across Europe, though the pace of change varied between regions. By the end of the fifteenth century, editions of the major classical authors had been printed and circulated throughout Europe, and the printed book had come to play a central role in the diffusion of classical literature. Between 1495 and 1515, the Venetian printer
Aldus Manutius, drawing on the knowledge of Greek scholars who had arrived in Italy following the collapse of the
Byzantine Empire, published the greater part of surviving Greek literature in printed editions; without the press, the equivalent recovery of Latin texts had taken over a century. Book production became increasingly commercial, and the first
copyright laws were passed. The press also changed how scholars shared their findings. Where researchers had previously circulated discoveries through manuscript letters with limited reach, printed journals allowed findings to be distributed to wider audiences more quickly, contributing to the
Scientific Revolution. Not all contemporaries welcomed these developments. The Dominican friar Filippo de Strata, writing around 1473, characterized the press as a "whore" (
meretrix) compared to the "virgin" pen, and argued that printers valued profit over accuracy and classical scholarship. The Benedictine abbot
Johannes Trithemius, in his 1492 treatise
De laude scriptorum manualium, argued that printing would make monks intellectually lazy, that paper books were less durable than parchment manuscripts, and that hand-copying sacred text was a spiritual discipline that mechanical reproduction could not replace. The Florentine humanist Niccolò Perotti argued in 1470 that many printed books in circulation were badly inaccurate. Gerolamo Squarzafico claimed in 1481 that most printers were illiterate, and Giorgio Merula voiced concern that printing could damage classical scholarship. Some critics also feared that religious heterodoxy would spread as biblical texts became accessible to readers without formal training. The spread of printing also contributed to the decline of Latin as the dominant language of publication. As works were increasingly issued in the
vernacular language of each region, printed texts helped to standardize the spelling and syntax of these languages, reducing their variability. Febvre and Martin argue that printing exercised a greater influence on the development of national languages than any other single factor, and identify the process as one of several forces contributing to the rise of nationalism in Europe. The economist
Jeremiah Dittmar has shown that cities where printing was established in the fifteenth century grew around 60 percent faster than comparable cities without presses between 1500 and 1600. == Industrial printing presses ==