Furthermore the output of early presses drew on a backlog of scribal work; the first century of printing produced a bookish culture that was not very different from that produced by scribes. The more closely one observes the age of incunabula the less likely one is to be impressed by changes wrought by print.

An interesting point to consider in light of where we now stand with ebooks. So far at least, we’re not so much witnessing a revolution as seeing a basic conversion from one medium to the next. The production of books remains firmly geared towards print, with digitization occurring almost as an afterthought.