The Printing Press as an Agent of Change

No, Dr. E did not write in this book about the Internet at all but at least in pages 65-110, you can see the parallels. There is plenty here to chew on and yes, having both volumes together is a whopper but this is at the bare minimum a TOP 10 book for everyone in the Western world because it gets right to the heart of this reality we call "economics". Excellent history and philosophy reading when you look at it from the right angle. It ranks up there with Drahos - Philosophy of IP, Kuhn's, Sorensen's thought experiments, Thoreau's selected journals, Dewey's how we think and Einstein's ideas and opinions.

This was a great book! It gave me a real appreciation for how foreign the medieval way of thought is from current -- because of the printing press. If you've read Walter Ong's _Orality and Literacy_, this is similarly mind-blowing.I will caution, however, that this is a very academic book. She spends a fair amount of time refuting people who disagreed with her. It is also designed for historians. I'm no dummy, but some stuff went over my head. (If you know the following phrases and people, you'll be fine: Plutarch, incunabula, Tridentine, Rabelais, Marlowe, the _Digest_, Cujas.)I gave it five stars because it was definitely worth slogging through, but I wish I had gotten the abridged version instead.

We have come to forget that the introduction of the printing press by Gutenberg mattered, or we have come to assume that it directly led to the Protestant Reformation. Eisenstein wondered how true that was, and what other changes the press wrought in European society in the couple of hundred years after the press was introduced. Start with the concept of authorship--once books could be reproduced in quantity, authorship mattered. Then consider the question of alphabetization and indexing. Then think of what happens when travel writers describe native dress--people start believing the books and variations become more extreme to meet the printed word. That's just the beginning. Eisenstein's book is not just an incredible work, well written, about the effect on our culture of the printing press. It is also the sort of book that makes one realize how unimaginable and vast the influence of any invention can have on a society. This book is critical for media studies, history, printing, typography, just to better understand our own society, or for the pleasure of a good, thorough, read.

If you suspect that the Internet is changing our world in profound ways, this book will stir insights into how technology can rapidly transform nearly every aspect of a culture. Unlike most commentators on the Renaissance, who take for granted the fact that printing brought about great change, Eisenstein focuses on *how* technology triggered and accelerated dramatic change. She focuses especially on the role of exposure to new points of view. For example, collaboration of printers, scholars and publishers in the first great publishing house, the Aldine Press, brought together people who previously had little knowledge of one anothers' world-views. In order to work together effectively, they were forced to see through one anothers' eyes. Indirect access to new viewpoints had an even broader impact. The ready availability of books allowed a genius such as Copernicus to study cosmology without devoting years of his life as a mendicant scholar. Eisenstein observes that the the movements of stars and planets hadn't changed; the newly available data were the opinions of previous cosmologists. For the first time in history, one could compare and contrast cosmologies in one's spare time, without sacrificing years to visit scattered libraries. Although Eisenstein makes no attempt to compare early modern Europe with today's world, a reader who is familiar with today's technological changes can hardly help but draw parallels. Gutenberg, the technical purist who was repeatedly sued for refusing to ship his product, acted out the role of the prototypical Silicon Valley inventor suffering from "creeping elegance." Gutenberg's typography has rarely been equalled, but he died bankrupt, his invention owned by the "venture capitalists" who funded him. Meanwhile, Aldus Manutius persuaded compromise among printers (technologists) and church scholars (the publishing establishment). The Aldine Press expertly packaged information into books and catalogs that were easy to sell. Like Microsoft, the Aldine Press became a dramatic business success by delivering excellence in packaging of others' inventions, not by making technical breakthroughs. Although Eisenstein does not focus greatly on the seat of power in early modern Europe, the Holy Roman Empire, the church clearly suffered the greatest losses of influence as a result of the distribution of new ideas. Eisenstein recalls the protests of Martin Luther to the Pope, saying that he had no idea how so many people obtained his theses so quickly. The Wittenberg Door appears as an early Web site, allowing anyone, including publishers, to seize ideas that previous could not have achieved wide distribution. Eisenstein's readers will surely wonder which institutions in today's world stand to lose influence and power as a result of easy access to a variety of points of view via the Internet.