When Johannes Gutenburg began printing books in Europe about the year 1450, transportation was by foot, animal, or boat. Communication networks were largely personal arrangements, and generally available postal systems didn’t exist. Nonetheless, by 1465, manuscript production was falling rapidly, and print book production was skyrocketing. In today’s circumstances, expect the transition to ebooks to happen much more rapidly than this fifteen-year, manuscript-to-print transition in the fifteenth century.
The statistics on the fifteenth-century manuscript-to-print transition are astonishing. Manuscript production in Europe was rising strongly through about 1465. However, from 1465 to 1485, manuscript production in central Europe fell by about half. Book production from 1454 to 1500 has recently been estimated about 13 million, while manuscript production for the whole fifteenth century is an estimated 5 million.[*] While these figures have considerable uncertainty, print production in its first half-century quite likely exceeded manuscript production in that half-century and the prior half-century.
Expect a title wave of ebooks!
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[*] See Tables 1-2 and Figure 1 in Buringh Eltjo, and van Zanden Jan Luiten. 2009. “Charting the “rise of the west”: Manuscripts and printed books in Europe, a long-term perspective from the sixth through eighteenth centuries.” Journal of Economic History. 69 (2): 409-445.