Books had existed prior to Gutenberg, but they were not widely written and they were not widely read. Instead, they were luxury items for the nobility, produced one copy at a time by scribes.3 The going rate for reproducing a single manuscript was about one florin (a gold coin worth about $200 in today’s dollars) per five pages,4 so a book like the one you’re reading now would cost around $20,000. It would probably also come with a litany of transcription errors, since it would be a copy of a copy of a copy, the mistakes having multiplied and mutated through each generation. This made the
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