With reference to Gutenberg Movable type, what are the impacts of printing on scholarship in the 21st century

The century after the introduction of the printing press saw a steady evolution of basic standards and techniques to organize bodies of knowledge and information. Tabulation, alphabetical order, reference guides, and graded textbooks all emerged into common use in the 21^st century after the printing press. With uniform texts it became possible to index and cross-reference material by page numbers and line numbers, and to cite previous works by author, date, title, and publisher. This made it possible to refine and integrate ideas and texts through time by comparison and commentary. The ideas of citation and peer review are fundamental to scholarly progress.

Imagine in the days before books. We now take for granted the idea of easy access to multiple sources of stored experience, but printed books were the first medium that brought that concept within reach of ordinary people.  Before books, almost all transfer of knowledge was by word of mouth. The only way to learn ideas, stories, or skills was by direct personal contact with somebody who had created them or acquired them from somebody else. 

Several benefits and Impacts followed the invention of modem printing:

  Printing press has been a significant force in transforming an oral medieval culture to a literate one or one which focuses more on silent and private reading (McLuhan 2001, Havelock 2003, Ong 2009). However, other scholars such as Eisenstein (1983) argued that the development of the printing press did not change medieval Europe as it was literate before the invention of the printing press. Print did not bring about a monumental shift from orality to literacy, but rather changed the Society from one type of literate society to another. While there is still debate in this area, one can agree that the printing press technology has had a profound effect on literacy within Europe which certainly was transferred to other part of the world.

• The printing press allowed for the democratizing of knowledge as a greater number of individuals were provided access to more information. Through the printing press, written work was more uniform in its viewing format. The mechanization of the printing press achieved more regular spacing and hyphenation of the print. (Bolter, 2001). Prior to the printing press, the written word was individually scribed with no standard format, with inconsistent writing, grammar and handwriting.
• The printing led to more consistent spelling, grammar and punctuation. (McLuhan, 2001). Through this uniformity and reliability of the written work, readers were able to consistently interpret the writer’s thoughts and ideas. While the printing press did not have any significant immediate effects on societal literacy, over the next few decades as more information through the written word was accessible and disseminated, this technology advanced mass literacy as demonstrated through a drastic rise in adult literacy. Prior to the printing press, books were quite expensive as it was a laborious task to hand-scribe each book. As a result, only the wealthy upper elite class could afford such books and therefore the literate were mainly found at this class level.

Before the invention, it was the laborious manual method used for producing books, which were then very expensive, but beautiful, as there were paid copyists, calligraphers and illuminators, who gave considerable attention to aesthetics of books. With the mass production of books went their beauty as physical objects; edito­rial quality came to be considered as more important than physical charac­teristics. (Aguolu and Aguolu 2002)

• The invention of the printing press creating nearly identical books of quality at an economical price, books were now more affordable and available to the general public. It is estimated that by 1500 there were “fifteen to twenty million copies of 30,000 to 35,000 separate publications.” (McLuhan, 2001)
  Printing Press and Its “Impact” on Literacy (scholarship)
  The advent of the printing press over five hundred years ago may be described as one of the few major significant events in mankind’s history in terms of the greatest impact on literacy. Before paper and print were invented, oral communication was the only method in which information was gathered and distributed (Aguolo and Aguolo, 2002). Even though this bound the community together, it did not allow the community to grow and there were no methods of accurately storing and retrieving information. Further, if the community moved on or perished so did their historical records and knowledge. Although the following technologies involved the written word in the form of papyrus scrolls and manuscript codex as examples, it was still quite time consuming and limited to the upper literate elite class of society. When the printing press was invented there was a shift from the laborious manuscript making to the codex print allowing many copies of written work to be quickly created, in turn providing greater access to information for all and providing the framework for the gradual transformation of societal literacy.