The German printers Sweynheym and Pannartz, established the first Italian printing press in Rome in 1465. In their first five years they printed 12,000 books. Over 1000 scribes would be needed to copy the same number of manuscripts. By the 1480s more than 100 printing presses were at work throughout Italy.

Print became unstoppable. By 1480 printing presses had been successfully established in all the major cities of Germany, France, the Netherlands, England, Spain, Hungary, and Poland. It has been estimated that by 1500 these presses had printed between six and 15 million books in 40,000 different editions, more books than had been produced since the fall of the Roman Empire. The figures for the i6th century are even more startling. In England alone 10,000 editions were printed and at least 150 million books were published amongst a European population of fewer than 80 million people.

The consequence of this massive dissemination of print was a revolution in knowledge and communication that affected society from top to bottom. The speed and quantity with which books were distributed suggests that print cultivated new communities of readers eager to consume the diverse material that rolled off the presses. The accessibility and relatively low cost of printed books also meant that more people than ever before had access to books. Printing was a profitable business. It responded to public demand, and generated success and wealth for the great printing houses Venice, London, and Antwerp.

A culture based on communication through listening, looking and speaking, changed gradually into a culture that interacted through reading and writing.