Why is printing important today

Today, there are multiple types of printing presses, each best for a specific type of printing. They include:. The entire process is done by hand. The letterpress is often used by small, boutique printers, and offers a beautiful handmade look.

The offset press revolutionized the printing industry, making it possible to print enormous quantities efficiently and cost-effectively. In a nutshell, modern offset printing involves using a computer to create a plate, which is then placed on a cylinder. Ink is applied to the plate cylinder, which rolls against a rubber cylinder, which in turn rolls the ink onto sheets of paper fed through the press.

Offset presses are used to mass produce newspapers, magazines, books, and other printed materials. Digital presses make low-volume printing affordable, and have similarly revolutionized the printing industry, because they do not require plates.

Instead, they use advanced inkjet or laser jet technology to transfer ink to paper. Though these are the most popular types of printing presses, other types exist for specialized purposes. For example, engravers are often used to create the raised logos often seen on letterhead. At first, the noble classes looked down on it. To them, hand-inked books were a sign of luxury and grandeur, and it was no match for the cheaper, mass-produced books.

Thus, press-printed materials were at first more popular with the lower classes. When word spread about the printing press, other print shops opened and soon it developed into an entirely new trade. Printed texts became a new way to spread information to vast audiences quickly and cheaply.

An important side effect was that people could read and increase their knowledge more easily now, whereas in the past it was common for people to be quite uneducated.

This increased the discussion and development of new ideas. The printing press also helped standardize language, grammar, and spelling. The industry has even embraced the Digital Age, which has given rise to online printing companies that make it easy for anyone to design, print, and mail printed materials without leaving their computers.

Hello, Guest. Cart 0. Featured Design Galleries Business Cards. Books have to be copied by hand, a slow and painstaking process that is prone to mistakes. For instance, one of the most copied works, the Bible, had several scribal errors and word substitutions during translations. Only a few books became available because of this. Their rarity made them invaluable and exclusive to scholars and monks.

A precursor to the printing press is woodblock printing. A block of wood was carved with a relief pattern for each page, which is then painted with ink. The relief pattern is then pressed to a surface to print. As you can see, you would need to carve another block if you needed to change anything. His innovation involved a movable type, where printers could rearrange letters and symbols.

Printers could also reuse them for other printouts, making printing cost-efficient and accessible to the general public. The move highly altered the structure of society, mainly because of this new way of spreading information.

For example, Gutenberg printed the first printed edition of the Bible in , which moved the Scriptures from the hands of the monks and scholars into the masses. Other German printers fled for greener pastures, eventually arriving in Venice, which was the central shipping hub of the Mediterranean in the late 15th century.

The ships left Venice carrying religious texts and literature, but also breaking news from across the known world.

Printers in Venice sold four-page news pamphlets to sailors, and when their ships arrived in distant ports, local printers would copy the pamphlets and hand them off to riders who would race them off to dozens of towns. Since literacy rates were still very low in the s, locals would gather at the pub to hear a paid reader recite the latest news, which was everything from bawdy scandals to war reports.

Sketch of a printing press taken from a notebook by Leonardo Da Vinci. The Italian Renaissance began nearly a century before Gutenberg invented his printing press when 14th-century political leaders in Italian city-states like Rome and Florence set out to revive the Ancient Roman educational system that had produced giants like Caesar, Cicero and Seneca.

One of the chief projects of the early Renaissance was to find long-lost works by figures like Plato and Aristotle and republish them. Wealthy patrons funded expensive expeditions across the Alps in search of isolated monasteries. Italian emissaries spent years in the Ottoman Empire learning enough Ancient Greek and Arabic to translate and copy rare texts into Latin.

The operation to retrieve classic texts was in action long before the printing press, but publishing the texts had been arduously slow and prohibitively expensive for anyone other than the richest of the rich. Palmer says that one hand-copied book in the 14th century cost as much as a house and libraries cost a small fortune.

The largest European library in was the university library of Paris, which had total manuscripts. Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses on the door of Wittenberg castle church. For millennia, science was a largely solitary pursuit. Great mathematicians and natural philosophers were separated by geography, language and the sloth-like pace of hand-written publishing. Not only were handwritten copies of scientific data expensive and hard to come by, they were also prone to human error.

With the newfound ability to publish and share scientific findings and experimental data with a wide audience, science took great leaps forward in the 16th and 17th centuries.