Hacker News Reader

Comment by rcbdev | Hacker News Reader

In my school curriculum here in Vienna, this was very specifically taught in history class.

That's really awesome! Did they have you try and typeset something by hand? I feel like for us it presented as some magical thing that made producing books trivially easy, whereas in reality typesetting a page was still very labor intensive and not that fast!

The printer setup is where all the cost is, the printing itself is practically free.

I think even the printing was still not _that_ fast. You needed to physically press down each page. Make sure the ink was right, replace the paper, make sure not to smudge anything, etc.

I'd be surprised if they could average more than 2 pages / minute? Which for 1000 pages is still a full days work.

Compare 30 seconds to print a sheet to the cost of pulling hundreds of letters out of bins, tossing worn ones out, casting new replacements, lining them up, inserting spaces, and proofreading. I'd probably want to print 1000 sheets before setting up another page.

I was involved a bit in printing manuals in the 1980s. The cost of printing 100 copies vs 1000 copies was pretty much the same. The delta is the cost of the paper.

Another way to phrase the question: how many copies on a Gutenberg before you're even in time with typesetting?

Random online estimates suggest 4 hours to typeset a page and 200 pages an hour. So 800 copies.

I think this makes my point that on a Gutenberg press printing the already typeset page still wasn't that fast.

300:1, as I wrote earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49253673

And inevitably, efforts were made to improve the efficiency of the printer.

I don't see how the reduction in price from a manuscript to a gutenberg pressed book is the same as the figure I was calculating?

Anyway, feels like this is no longer a productive discussion.

We learned about how the Gutenberg Press physically worked, how it was based on wine presses and how difficult it supposedly was to produce a single metal letter. Also, how it was a PITA to re-arrange them to print something else, alas it was mostly used to print the Bible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com