The Printing Press

The printing press was developed around AV 1525 by the inventor Govind Harish in the city of Figora on the island of Kobesh. It revolutionized the production of written materials and led to the development of public-access libraries across the world.

Utility

The printing press has streamlined the process of copying books and documents. Now it is possible to create hundreds of copies almost simultaneously, and this has reduced the cost of books and increased their availability. Thanks to the printing press, there are a large number of bookshops that are readily accessible to the general public, and books are no longer a symbol of wealth like they once were when they were expensive and more rare.

Access & Availability

Word of Harish's incredible invention quickly spread among scholars across the world, and the knowledge was shared quite willingly by the inventor. Soon, nearly every library and publisher had their own printing press. In most large cities today, one can find at least two different printing houses that will copy and print whatever one requests for a fee. Presses are large and rather expensive, so the machines themselves are not readily available for consumer purchase.

Complexity

Modern printing presses are designed to be operated by a single crank and to print several pages at once, so they can be rather complicated. It involves a lot of delicate gears and moving parts, as well as the moving letters themselves, which are affixed to the printing plate before use.

Discovery

Govind Harish worked in the Krobeshan National Library in Figora, where he copied books and written works from their original sources to create duplicates that could be sent to other libraries. It was exhausting and tedious work, and eventually Harish decided to work on developing a way to make copies at a much faster pace. Inspired by the seals used to mark each of his copied books as products of the library, he decided to create what was essentially a massive stamp but that would hold an entire page's worth of words. Soon after, Harish came upon the idea of movable type that could be rearranged to form unlimited words, sentences, and pages. This made the task of copying a book page by page only a matter of arranging the letters once and then stamping them out as many times as necessary, then repeating with the rest of the pages. It could print more pages in a shorter span of time than it took Harish to copy a single page by hand.