Second century BC, paper was manufactured in China (it would not be manufactured in Europe until the 12th century).
Interestingly, this early shift was from a scroll read from the top to the bottom, to a paginated system (beginning with folded quartos and folios). We are now returning to a scroll form when reading on a computer screen, although the scrolling screen is much easier to navigate due to pagination, indexes, and concordances. This ease of navigation has always been important - in fact it was one of the primary affordances that made the codex popular with readers. However, when the change from the scroll to the codex occurred it also became possible to join a large number of texts together into one volume, but this advantage was not immediately explored. It seems to me the same is true in the shift to electronic texts; while navigation within e-texts was a primary concern in early development, hyperlinking texts and creating archives of multiple texts came later.
“Most persons are surprised, and many distressed, to learn that essentially the same objections commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus (274– 7) and in the Seventh Letter against writing. Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product. The same of course is said of computers. Secondly, Plato’s Socrates urges, writing destroys memory. Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources. Writing weakens the mind.” (Ong 79)
By Plato’s day a change had set in: the Greeks had at long last effectively interiorized writing – something which took several centuries after the development of the Greek alphabet. (Havelock 1963, p. 49, citing Rhys Carpenter)
By the 8th century BC the Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet and adapted it to their own language, creating in the process the first "true" alphabet, in which vowels were accorded equal status with consonants. (Eisenstein dates the development of the Greek alphabet around 720– 700 BC)
The world's oldest known printed book, The Diamond Sutra, a seven-page scroll printed with wood blocks on paper, is produced in China.
In the 11th century the Chinese and Koreans continue to experiment with movable type, using clay, wood, bronze and iron. The complexity of Chinese and Korean symbols creates a major stumbling block to the process.
In the twelfth century AD writing shifts from being a largely religious act to preserve - and horde - history, to a scholastic one. Book production began to shift from the monasteries to lay stationers in the twelfth century, centuries before the advent of print. In this system copyists were given portions of a text and were paid from the stationer for each piece (pecia system). This is the so-called “book revolution” of the twelfth century in which production moved from free labor of monks under supervision of the universities to the wage labor of copyists under supervision of the stationers. Silent reading is difficult because words are not separate, so this is still predominantly an oral culture.
Between 1350 and 1450 this trend toward printed books temporarily reversed and the monastic scriptoria had one last “golden age” before the advent of print. But, even after the printing press arrived, the practice of copying by hand remained. For example, in Johannes Trithemius’ De Laude Scriptorum the Abbot of Sponheim “not only exhorted his monks to copy, but enriched an ancient topos” by explaining why it is beneficial to monastic life to continue copying despite the invention of the printing press. Trithemius even incorrectly cited that word on parchment would last longer than the printed word on paper. This was during a time when texts were printed on both papyrus (short life-span) or vellum (long life-span). In contradiction to these claims, he had his work printed in a Mainz print shop.(13-14)
The earliest public library in England is believed to be established
