Our World In Data In-Class Essay

For this essay, I decided to focus on book production within the last 1000 years or so, as books are a vital component to the flourishing and development of society. The article not only focuses on books and there widespread production following Gutenberg’s invention, but also on the manuscript production going back to the first century. One graph that really surprises me is one that shows the manuscript per century production (6th-15th century) of various European countries, where the number of transcripts is a function of year. Looking at function graph of Italy, I am really surprised to see how fast Italy increases its manuscript production over the course of two centuries. In 1250, Italy only has about 250 million manuscripts, but by 1450, those numbers are at around 1.5 billion. My speculation is that Italian Renaissance era is the underlying factor for this linear growth, as this era was a time in which much knowledge was spread. Another graph that really surprises me is one that shows the production of printed books per half century (1475-1775), where number of books is a function of year. Generally speaking, the data shows that most European countries experience small and gradual linear growth between 1475- 1700, followed by rapid linear growth until 1775. It is surprising to see that even following the invention of the Gutenberg press in the 1400s, it takes nearly 300 years for most European countries to experience the benefits of invention and a boom in production, and not around 100 years as I would have predicted. I am not exactly sure why this is the case but it might be that internal European conflicts like the French Revolution prevented this growth. Another trend that this article discusses is the idea that as efficiency increases (i.e invention of printing press), marginal cost of producing each book decreases. This in turn decrease the price of books, leading to an increase of demand. Overall, I really enjoyed reading this article because it taught me not to undermine external factors outside of the data itself (i.e. invention), because they certainly can have a huge impact on the data.