I'm compressing thoughts for brevity. The codex, handwritten, allowed random access, but was still phenomenally expensive to create. On the order of a million dollars per copy. They were chained, the language was standardised -- you brought readers to the work (Latin) rather than works to readers (vernacular).
Moveable type, cheap paper, mass literacy, vernacular language, typographic conventions, high-speed presses, and mass distribution, create a wholly different impact.
As Elizabeth Eisenstein noted, the printing press is an agent of social change. Generalised, all comms tech is.
So do scrolls. You're not supposed to open the entire scroll at once. The codex is better at this.
> but was still phenomenally expensive to create. On the order of a million dollars per copy.
This is nonsense. You can prepare a very expensive book, but you don't have to. The idea that books were necessarily earth-shakingly expensive to create conflicts with the known reality of commercial popular novels in the ancient world.
Moveable type, cheap paper, mass literacy, vernacular language, typographic conventions, high-speed presses, and mass distribution, create a wholly different impact.
As Elizabeth Eisenstein noted, the printing press is an agent of social change. Generalised, all comms tech is.