This article is superficially correct but omits enormous amounts of detail. Woodblock printing is ancient, mostly used for religious texts but requires very li

This article is superficially correct but omits enormous amounts of detail. Woodblock printing is ancient, mostly used for religious texts but requires very little infrastructure. Obviously not suitable for small printing runs, as the entire block has to be carved at once. Bi Sheng invented movable type using porcelain characters. But Chinese is fantastically ill suited to that sort of printing; it was viewed historically as a novelty and not used basically at all. He decamped to Korea where he found a more receptive audience, IIRC. Gutenburg's type alloy and the casting process were the real core of the innovation; the rest of the technology existed, but wasn't compelling without the ability to mass produce characters and with a reliable type alloy. Oddly enough and for reasons I don't fully understand, woodblock printing didn't take off in Europe until after moveable type came in; mostly for illustrations, IIRC.