Guardian Net news
3 December 2000

From 1454 to 1455, in the German town of Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg used his invention of printing by moveable type to create about 180 copies of the Bible. Of these, 48 copies survive. The British Library has two of them - one (printed on paper) donated with the library of King George III, the other (printed on vellum) bequeathed by Thomas Grenville in the nineteenth century.
They are among the most precious things in the Library's collections. One volume of the paper edition is now on permanent display in the Gallery. It has what Walter Benjamin would call 'an aura', which stems not so much from its (surprisingly handsome) appearance as the significance which hindsight attributes to it. It is impossible to look upon Gutenberg's handiwork without recalling that this is an artefact which transformed the world.

Not that the good citizens of Mainz realised that at the time. They had no idea that Gutenberg's technology would undermine the authority of the Catholic church, fan the flames which led to the Reformation, create the communications infrastructure needed for the rise of modern science and even - if Neil Postman is to be believed - lead to the invention of childhood as an extended, protected phase in the lives of young people.

Or, to put it more succinctly, that printing would turn the world upside down.

But not everybody can get to look at Gutenberg's magical artefact in the flesh, as it were, which is why it is marvellous to discover that the British Library has now put both of its bibles on the Web (at http://www.bl.uk).

Users of the site can obtain virtual magnifications of the pages, allowing them to examine details not easily visible to the naked eye on the original printed pages and to get an impression of the differences between the paper and vellum copies.

There is something deeply fitting about making Gutenberg's work available in this way, for the Web represents the most radical transformation in mankind's communications environment since the invention of printing.

This is one of those grand, unprovable conjectures detested by professional historians, but just suppose, for a minute, that it's true - that Tim Berners-Lee (the British inventor of the Web) will eventually be seen as an innovator on a par with Gutenberg. What might that imply?

Answer: that a certain amount of humility is in order. The Web is just over 10 years old, and it's only been a mass medium since 1995, so we stand in the same relation to it as the burghers of Mainz did to print in the year 1460. And we are no more able to foresee the long-term consequences of the technology than they were in their day. All we can say for sure at this point is that the Web has led to an unprecedented explosion in publishing.

Print was a wonderful liberator but for a long time the technology was available only to a few, and required access to capital, skill and credentials - which is why printers occupied such a pivotal role in society for so long.

Print changed the world because it enabled the rapid dissemination of ideas. Today, anybody can become a global publisher or printer - and virtually everybody does. Last week the Industry Standard, a technology weekly, reported an AltaVista prediction that there will be 100 billion Web pages by 2005. We are rapidly approaching the point where everything that is written can be instantly available, everywhere, on the Web.

We have no idea what the long-term implications of this will be, but I suspect that one effect will be to transform our concept of knowledge. Up to now, erudition has been synonymous with holding knowledge in one's head. But in a comprehensively Web-orientated future, it might simply mean knowing where to find stuff. What Gutenberg started, the search engines will finish.

john.naughton@observer.co.uk