Eisenstein 3 is able to compare the price of paying a scribe to duplicating a translation of Plato’s Dialogues with the price for duplicating the same work by the Ripoli printing press in Florence in 1483. This implies that the production of one copy of the Bible meant 136 days of work. Clark notes that “with both hand production and the printing press the main cost in book production was labor (paper and parchment production costs were mainly labor costs).”Ĭlark (2008) notes that copyists before the time of the printing press were able to copy 3,000 words of plain text per day. Productivity is measured as the ratio between the wage of building craftsmen and the price of a book of standard characteristics. The smaller price was possible by the increased efficiency in the production of books since the invention of the printing press around 1440.Ĭlark (2008) measures the subsequent productivity increase as the ratio between the wage of building craftsmen and the price of a book and finds a 20-fold increase in productivity in the first 200 years after the invention, as shown in this graph. The increased demand of books was driven by a huge decrease in the price of books. Buringh and Van Zanden note: “in the year 1550 alone, for example, some 3 million books were produced in Western Europe, more than the total number of manuscripts produced during the fourteenth century as a whole”. The most decisive development for the increased book production was the invention of the printing press. The growth of the book sector in Western Europe over the 1300 years studied by the authors is enormous.
The authors give the following example: ‘The first printing of Gutenberg’s Bible is one title, and new editions of the Bible will again be counted, but a reprint of exactly the same manuscript would not be included.’īuringh and Van Zanden note that the aggregation of the data to country levels obscures inequalities within countries – ‘if we could isolate data on, for example, northern Italy or the north of France (including Paris), these regions rank much higher in output per capita’. Different language versions of the same title published in a particular country should be considered as individual titles’ this includes first editions and reeditions. The authors define a title as ‘a printed publication which forms a separate whole, whether issued in one or several volumes. Titles are either books (which have by definition more than 49 pages) or pamphlets (less than 50 pages). The authors consider their estimates to be conservative and note that the “figures should be interpreted as low estimates”. The authors corrected the numbers to account for the underrepresentation of estimates for different geographical regions and different times. The unit of analysis for the estimates of printed books is (new) ‘title’ or ‘edition’. The unit of analysis for the estimates of manuscripts is the number of individual manuscripts. The increased production of manuscripts and books was estimated by Buringh and Van Zanden (2009).
#World famous books driver#
Particularly interesting is the transition from manuscripts to books – book production became more efficient, prices decreased and the consumption of books increased.Ī major driver for the increased production of books is the revolution of literacy, which we study in detail in our literacy entry.
But we will also study the history of manuscripts that preceded printed books. The crucial event was the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg around 1440. Several recent research papers and books have made it possible to follow the rise of book production. In this entry we study the history of books over the last centuries.
If you have expertise in this area and would like to contribute, apply here to join us as a researcher. We will further develop our work on this topic in the future (to cover it in the same detail as for example our entry on World Population Growth). The data and research currently presented here is a preliminary collection or relevant material. Notice: This is only a preliminary collection of relevant material
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