By Kerby Anderson

If you are like me, you probably have bookshelves full of books. But there was a time not so long ago in western civilization when books were rare.

Nick Bilton (technology reporter for the New York Times) asks us to imagine that we could travel back in time to 1424. If you went to the University of Cambridge in England, you would find one of the largest libraries in the world in Europe. Here you would see an impressive list of 122 books. Each book was large, delicate, and beautifully illustrated. Because the books were made by hand, there were few. Fifty years later you would find that the university had 330 books. Today, the University of Cambridge has more than 7 million books.

We know why that happened. Johannes Gutenberg published the Gutenberg Bible in 1452. At first, its impact was slight. But soon enough printing presses gained traction in the bookmaking world and books became something that people could own.

At the time, there was resistance. Monks who took months (even years) to produce one of the books of the 15th century dismissed this new technological form. Most laypeople were not literate, so the new technology produced books that most people could not read. Nevertheless, printing press books gained traction and the books on our bookshelves testify to their success.

We are now in the midst of another publishing revolution. Many of the books I am reading right now are ones that I downloaded electronically to a reading device. Holding such a device isn’t quite the same as holding a printed book in my hand, but does have many advantages (such as searching for topics inside the book). And I can load a library full of books on my iPad or computer and take them with me to read.

The printing press increased the number of books in a university library from 122 to 7 million. Today we are in the midst of a major revolution with this new electronic technology.