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Publishing

Publishing became possible with the invention of writing but became more practical with the invention of printing. Prior to printing, distributed works were copied manually, by scribes.

The Chinese inventor Bi Sheng made movable type of earthenware c. 1045 and was spread to Korea later. Around 1230, Koreans invented a metal type movable printing. East metal movable type was spread to Europe between the late 14th century and early 15th century. In c. 1450, Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type in Europe. This invention gradually made books less expensive to produce and more widely available.

Early printed books, single sheets, and images created before 1501 in Europe are known as incunables or incunabula. "A man born in 1453, the year of the fall of Constantinople, could look back from his fiftieth year on a lifetime in which about eight million books had been printed, more perhaps than all the scribes of Europe had produced since Constantine founded his city in A.D. 330."

Eventually, printing enabled other forms of publishing besides books. The history of newspaper publishing began in Germany in 1609, with the publishing of magazines following in 1663.