There is no question that the pace of technological change can make your head spin. Who can keep up? So much data flying around at such incredible velocity.
In my experience, it is generally the speed of change, and not the change itself, that makes us nervous. We wonder if we will ever be able to adjust to these changes. But when it comes to books, where would we be today without technology? Think back, to what could be argued, was the greatest technological breakthrough ever.
As a book-lover, try to imagine life prior to the mid-fifteenth century. Truth be told it would have been hard to be a book-lover back then with books being handwritten, often taking years to reproduce.
A very few could even read and for those who could read, finding books was a challenge. Scholars would travel hundreds of miles to visit a library that might house twenty books.
All that changed around the year 1440* with the invention of the printing press.
With that invention (a.k.a. technology), multiple books could be printed and distributed at once. This breakthrough had such a powerful impact it is estimated that by the turn of the century, a mere sixty years later, 2,500 European cities had printing presses and there may have been up to 15 million books in print. Talk about the speed of technology!
This technology changed everything, and not only in the fact that you could print books faster and make them more readily available. Literacy rates increased dramatically with new ideas being transmitted faster and farther.
But like all technology, this printing breakthrough had a shadow side. Now it became more difficult to control ideas as books and even small pamphlets could be produced easily and more affordably. Soon inventive, breathtaking, seditious, and even heretical ideas were flowing everywhere. The genie was out of the bottle, and knowledge and learning were set loose upon the masses.
Fast forward to the 21st century and one can understand today's struggle over the transmission of ideas. Now we can 'go anywhere' in a matter of seconds and read the thoughts and ideas of anyone. Now we can read a physical or electronic book, listen to an audio book, or catch a book summary on our MP3 players.
We can even get 'print on demand' which in some ways is the modern version of the old way of printing out one book at a time. We might want to stop, or at least slow down, the onslaught of technological inventiveness, but we do well to remember where it all started and be grateful for all we have.
* The historical record shows that the Chinese likely had some kind of moveable type as early as 1041 AD. Even so, most scholars regard Gutenberg?s 1440 version as the beginning of the printing press revolution as we know it.
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