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Comment by Merrill | Hacker News Reader

"Prices and the Growth of the European Knowledge Economy, 1200-2007" by Rodney Edvinsson and Johan Söderberg Department of Economic History Stockholm University: https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:384596/FULLTEXT0...

See page 10, Figure 5: Price of paper/CPI in England, 1356-1869, and the Netherlands, 1450-1800.

This shows that the price of paper declined exponentially from 1350 to 1650. The decrease in the cost of paper made printing economical. Printing on vellum was not. They point out that each Gutenberg Bible printed on vellum required the skins of 300 sheep.

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>They point out that each Gutenberg Bible printed on vellum required the skins of 300 sheep.

Even that doesn't say much about its value. I have no idea the scale of the sheep industry in these times. Presumably people were growing up sheep to make use of the entire sheep, not merely to create bibles. It might be better to consider what that sheep leather might have been used for otherwise if it didn't have a buyer in the form of a printing press.

Even accounting for that, it was definitely much higher than a few cents per sheet.

The causality can easily run in the other direction, with the desire to print things pushing people into using cheap, shoddy paper instead of quality vellum.

The cost of the hides and the labor of turning them into vellum dominated the labor of inscribing a page. Printing would not decrease the cost of finished pages, especially for small numbers of copies.

The decrease in the cost of paper resulted from the increased availability of linen rags, use of wind power in production of rag pulp, and the larger volumes of rag paper used for commercial records and correspondence before the invention of printing.

Your logic is that the drive to produce more books wouldn't lead to using cheaper paper... because paper was, at the beginning of the process, extremely expensive?

I have many books, and none of them are on sheepskin. They are not printed on cheap, shoddy paper.

Why do you say so? Would printing them on vellum make them cheaper, or shoddier?

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