How was the printing press faster?

the average human handwrites at about 22 words per minute or 1300 words an hour when copying something. The bible has about 800,000 words and the Gutenberg has about 1200 pages so that's 660 words per page. Along that logic a person can copy around 2 pages per hour. The wikipedia entry suggests about 4 pages per hour by the way. Obviously it would be longer if you want to try to make the script look really pretty for a rich patron.

Now Gutenberg's first printing press could supposedly print about 25 pages per hour. So that's 10 times as fast. I suspect setting up the type for that page took quite a while, considerably longer than handwriting the same page would take. However, you could theoretically make up for that in volume by printing out lots of copies of that page.

Later presses of course improved on this, improving the speed of setting the movable type being a priority. Wikipedia's printing press entry has pretty good typical numbers:

The mechanization of bookmaking led to the first mass production of books in history in assembly line-style. A single Renaissance printing press could produce 3,600 pages per workday, compared to forty by typographic hand-printing and a few by hand-copying. Books of bestselling authors like Luther or Erasmus were sold by the hundreds of thousands in their lifetime.

Explanation:

Basically where throughput is concerned, the two aren't even comparable. In a world that includes printing presses, a person trying to promote an idea via hand-copying is bringing a knife to a gunfight.

By the way, the idea of copying a book page by page (so called block-printing) was already used in Asia for more than a thousand years. At the time of Gutenberg, Chinese printers where said to achieve up to 200 pages an hour. So it is inacurate to say that this gave Europa an advantage. It would take another 400 years before printing speed was significantly increased but by then the speed increases were fast and dramatic.

Hope this helps you

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