Sample Solution

Before the establishment of the printed press, and therefore books, publications were very scarce and generally only available to people of high class and power such as nobles and members of the Church. This began to change when Johannes Gutenberg invented the first form of printing press and type-mould in 1440; word of this invention spread quickly and very quickly others improved on Gutenberg’s work. Although this apparatus did not immediately grant society easy access to books (which were still being seen as items of higher luxury and only meant for members of the Church), production of books was much faster and therefore they eventually became much more accessible to the general public. This lead to a higher standard of literacy throughout society; the more people read, the volume of books increases. This newfound relatively unrestricted spread of information and ideas began to threaten the political and religious powers of the time; where “the sharp increase in literacy broke the monopoly of the literate elite education and learning and bolstered the emerging middle class.”. By 1480, printing press was being used in at least 110 different places across Europe, and from then onwards it is understood that the printing press and books had become a large part of European culture.

The new developments in the printing press lead to becoming a factor in the creation of groups of scientists who were consequently able to easily express their experiments and discoveries by using heavily circulated scholarly journals, clearly showing how books helped bring on the scientific revolution. The increasing popularity of the printing press made authorship a more attractive profession as it had become more profitable and had an underlying deeper meaning. It had become of great importance who had written texts, as well as what the precise formulation and time of writing actually was. Before the heightened popularity of printed texts, the author was of much less importance and was us