One particular sentence from Duffy's article particular impressed me when I read that review:
Moreover, the competitive nature of the printing industry, which was driven by a desire for sales, provided a new, more public outlet for controversies and insured that what began as a scholarly dispute between theologians gained an international audience.Remember that we are talking about the threshold of the sixteenth century, yet the tension between scholarly and mercantile pursuits is no different today than it was then. The fact is that, over the course of the centuries, the public airing of disputes has had a healthy history as a marketable commodity with far greater impact than any interest in the dissemination of knowledge through reading or other educational practices. If Tim Berners-Lee spent more time reading history, he might have realized that 1) the World Wide Web would become the largest possible public arena for such disputes and 2) there would be those clever enough to make a fast buck out of those disputes by selling advertising space on the "virtual walls" of that arena. Sadly, he still seems to think that the growth of knowledge is all that matters, even if much of Eisenstein's research chose to focus on the plethora of "unexpected results" (a phrase from Duffy's review) that followed in the wake of the printing press.
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