> Printing presses produce superior products.
That seems like a highly dubitable statement. Many hand illuminated manuscripts are masterpieces of art. The advantage of the printing press was chiefly economical making the cost of a copy dramatically less, not an increase in quality (especially so by the aesthetical standards of the time).
I would say it is the perfect metaphor.
I love audiobooks but at this point, most of what I want to listen to is stuff that would not sell enough to bother having someone read.
There are also many voice actors who I simply don't like the way they read.
A future that I can pick a voice that I like for any PDF is a huge upgrade.
I think a problem people have is if on the young side, maybe didn't expect the future to change like this.
No one I knew went on the internet when I graduated high school. Change like this is all par for the course. The only advice I got in high school from a guidance counselor was that I had a nice voice for radio. Books on tape was not exactly a career option at the time. The culture will survive the death of a career path that didn't even really exist when I was a senior in high school.
As a work of art, sure. But as books containing information, printing presses produced superior products.
Many (most, if not all) hand-made copies contained errors, which printed books did not. They were much closer to 1:1 copies.
If the mistake happened in the typesetting stage, printed books could spread errors much more efficiently, as in the infamous "wicked bible" of 1631, where a typesetting error made the ten commandments contain the amusing phrase "Thou shalt commit adultery". Surviving copies are quite the collectors' item as most were destroyed.
Usually, though, errors are corrected and every every printing has fewer errors than the previous one.
What percentage of books get a second print run on a printing press? And what's the process for that? Do they have to reset each word for the second run? I genuinely don't know how a physical process like typesetting can result in increased accuracy on each print.
Indeed. Even Gutenberg had his Bibles touched up by artists after they were printed (illuminated capital letters and so on) because even he believed his printed copies were inferior to the hand-made ones.