Page 7 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

CHAPTER I
Difficulties in Comparing the Present Transition from Print to Digital to the Transition from Manuscript to
T Print in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century
hose familiar with the early history of printing and its impact on European society in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries may have occasionally entertained the notion that the transition from print
to digital we are presently experiencing is a kind of fast-forward replay, on a multi-dimensional or multi-media scale, of what happened after Johannes Gutenberg invented printing by movable type over five hundred years ago. Will the Internet and digital books eventually make printed books obsolete the way that printing eventually made manuscript copying obsolete? Could studying what happened in the late Middle Ages and earlier somehow pro- vide insight into the present rapid change in the form and function of the book?
Attempting to compare two multi-faceted transitions in media separat- ed by more than five hundred years is, I suppose, one of those problems that some people might wonder about, but few would try to research in detail. Having researched in and around this topic for about twenty years, I doubt that we can, with any accuracy, compare fifteenth-century develop- ments in media with those of our own time. What I used to characterize as an attempt at comparison I now characterize more as a study of analogies. There are many analogies between fifteenth-century developments and our time. Whether these developments are truly comparable may be debatable, so building the arguments one way or the other is problematic. To review fifteenth-century developments in the form and function of the book and
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