The End of the Gutenberg Era

Digitization has brought the five hundred-year-old Gutenberg era to an end. Gutenberg’s press opened the gates to our modern rational, secular world. The cultural impact of today’s digital technologies, which will bring multilingual literacy to the far corners of the earth, foreshadows far greater changes. Gutenberg’s contemporaries could not begin to imagine the effect of movable type on the centuries to come, nor can we imagine the far greater changes that digitization will bring, but we can see even now that the book publishing industry is in for a radical transformation. Five hundred and some years ago in the German city of Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg, the son of a goldsmith, who made his own living by selling trinkets at religious fairs, had a scheme for unifying the Catholic Church, which was fractured at the time by many schisms, resulting in a fierce competition for the souls of the faithful and a threat to Gutenberg’s religious trinket business. His idea was to print a uniform missal on the bookmaking machine he had just invented to be distributed to all the churches of Europe, hoping to restore Catholicism at last as the universal church of its fathers’ dreams and at the same time secure the market for his mirrors and charms. Gutenberg’s printing press would of course have just the opposite effect. His press would be remembered as the sine qua non of general literacy, the fuse that lit the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and our modern, secular world. Under the impact of Gutenberg’s machine the church would disintegrate in Northern Europe, but Gutenberg would end up bankrupt and a money lender would seize his invention claiming it as his own. Luckily for Gutenberg historians eventually unraveled the actual The End of the Gutenberg Era