I think the parent is misremembering Kay’s point a little. It’s not that people didn’t catch on to the idea that the printing press could make books cheaper/mo

I think the parent is misremembering Kay’s point a little. It’s not that people didn’t catch on to the idea that the printing press could make books cheaper/more portable because they weren’t so laborious to create. That much was obvious about its utility. Kay’s point as I remember was that, at least initially, automation of previous tasks is all they wanted to do with it. They got this great new machine that opened up tons of possibilities, but all they used it for was to make faster the same thing they were doing before. But we all know rather than saving some monks some time, what the printing press really did was fundamentally transform society. That’s what people missed, and it’s something people keep missing about transformative technologies, even today. In his book Mindstorms (which every programmer needs to read), Seymour Papert makes the same observation about computers when they were introduced in classrooms; he says that instead of unlocking the full potential of those machines, educators just used them to automate activities they were doing before - times tables, essay writing, drawing graphs, etc. Very few people realized the potential at the time, and most still don’t.