Z:gnu-www-ja-copyright-versus-community-2000--084e93-Later on, printing was develop/en

Later on, printing was developed and printing changed the situation greatly. It provided a much more efficient way to make copies of books, provided that they were all identical. And it required specialised, fairly expensive equipment that an ordinary reader would not have. So in effect it created a situation in which copies could only feasibly be made by specialised businesses, of which the number was not that large. There might have been hundreds of printing presses in a country and hundreds of thousands, or maybe even millions of actually people who could read. So the decrease in the number of places in which copies could be made was tremendous.