Explain “the shift from hand printing to mechanical printing led to the print revolution”.

• Printing presses were set up in most countries of Europe within a hundred years between 1450 and 1550.

• Printers from Germany travelled to other countries to start new presses. As the number of printing presses grew this resulted in the boom of book production.

• The second half of the fifteenth century saw 20 million copies of printed books flooding the markets in Europe. The number went up in the sixteenth century to about 200 million copies.

• This shift from hand printing to mechanical printing led to the print revolution