pretty sure you can just use wood or whatever for the lettering, sure it might be kinda shit and tend to break but it should work. having to make new letter stamps every now and then is better than painstakingly writing every letter for hand.
The main problem with that is that you can’t make the types very small with wood, and the singlemost expensive ingredient in this whole printing press concept is the paper.
So you would end up having books with very little text on each page, and especially in a slave economy, it would just be much cheaper to make handwritten copies, since you could cram a lot more words on each page.
And again, this is not adressing the issue of even having the skill to make paper in the first place.
All you have to do is teaching intelligent people some math and tell them about experiments and that nature can be understood. The rest will follow.
Everything can be accelerated by adding the idea of the printing press.
Did the Greeks not do experiments? They knew math. They even hypothetically knew about atoms.
The Greeks held themselves back because most of their intellectual elite considered abstract thought as more noble than hands-on experimenting.
An offline version of Wikipedia would be handy though.
The main challenge with inventing a working printing press would be the papermaking and level of metalworking required for the movable type.
pretty sure you can just use wood or whatever for the lettering, sure it might be kinda shit and tend to break but it should work. having to make new letter stamps every now and then is better than painstakingly writing every letter for hand.
The main problem with that is that you can’t make the types very small with wood, and the singlemost expensive ingredient in this whole printing press concept is the paper.
So you would end up having books with very little text on each page, and especially in a slave economy, it would just be much cheaper to make handwritten copies, since you could cram a lot more words on each page.
And again, this is not adressing the issue of even having the skill to make paper in the first place.