The book draws upon the rich information gathered for the online database Catalogue of early German printed music / Verzeichnis deutscher Musikfrühdrucke (vdm) , the first systematic descriptive catalogue of music printed in the German-speaking lands between c. 1470 and 1540, allowing precise conclusions about the material production of these printed musical sources. Chapters 8 and 9 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.