The Printing Press and the Business of Books

[A] The usual account of the printing press credits it with spreading ideas quickly. That is true, but it misses what changed first, which was the economics of the book trade. [B] A manuscript copied by hand cost roughly the same for the first copy as for the fiftieth; the scribe's time simply repeated itself. Setting type, by contrast, was expensive at the start and almost free thereafter. [C] Once the forme was locked up, each additional sheet cost only paper and a few minutes of labour. The difference was not a technicality; it decided which books came into existence at all.

That shift changed what was worth publishing. A printer who had to sell several hundred copies to recover the cost of setting the type could not afford to serve a handful of specialists. [D] He looked instead for texts with a wide audience: grammars, almanacs, devotional handbooks, and above all school books, which sold reliably year after year. Some scholarly works that scribes had been happy to produce in twos and threes now went unprinted for decades, because no printer could see a market for them.