General information about Gutenberg and the Gutenberg project

This is some general information I found about Gutenberg. I used Google and Clusty, two search engines to find the information and I also searched Wikipedia and Idea Finder

Here is what I found out.

Johannes Gutenberg was born in 1398 in Germany and lived until he was 70. He is the father of modern day printing. He discovered ways of printing books using a printing press and his most famous book was the Gutenberg Bible. At the time, inventions were often associated with religion as well as enterprise. It is claimed that Gutenberg used his printing press to mass-produce indulgences! These slips of paper were sold by the Church to relieve the buyer from time in purgatory for sins committed in this life. This made it possible for the wealthy to buy their way to heaven. The Gutenberg bible sold for the equivalent of three years wages for a clerk and so printed books were very expensive. This was because it would take at least half a day to type set one page for the press and the press itself would need 25 crafts men to operate. Today we can copy and display and entire bible text electronically in seconds.

The Gutenberg Project is named after Gutenberg because it aims to make as many books as possible available freely to everyone using the internet. To-day publishing on the internet means that we can search millions of books and journals for information. There was a big change in paper based printing using laser printers and digital technologies but this might simply be a stepping stone to e-books where everything is read from electronic paper or digital displays. Some people think this will be a bad thing because books have an appeal of their own. No doubt some people would have said this about hand written books and parchment scrolls. Only time will tell whether books as we know them to day will survive.

Here is a link to a video about the way printing has changed society. I have just made a link to You Tube because the video file would be too big to upload. Web publishing is only a few years old but it looks like it might have as big an effect on the way we live as the printing press.