Sometime around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg, then living in the important medieval town of Mainz, Germany, invented the moveable-type printing press. It turned out to be a driving force for dissemination of knowledge, helping to power the age we know variously as the Renaissance and the early modern period, and marking the beginning of the first information age.
Five hundred years later, we are poised at the brink of profound changes in how we access the printed word, how we think of publishing, and the real possibility that the contents of the world’s libraries will soon to be available to us at the click of a mouse. But the question remains: will this revolution be the seed for a new renaissance, or the death of publishing as we now know it? Or maybe both?
