Silly but genuine question: how to you use movable type without a printing press?
I mean, once you've arranged all your type onto a plate representing a page, what are you going to do with it except slap some ink on it and put paper against it? Is the difference that the Chinese just lay the paper manually over it rather than use a machine (the press) to do it?
Probably. Much like woodblock printing, which can be done with or without press.
Also a printing press would not lay the paper, it was "just" used to press said paper onto the type (which had been inked by hand).
You'd lay the type, then ink the type, lay paper on top (usually using a frame to ensure it's correctly positioned), move the assembly under the press then press it down.
Release the press, open the assembly, get the printed sheet out, repeat (minus laying the type).
That Gutenberg also invented movable metal type in europe, as well as a production process for reproducible quality metal type, are probably bigger factors than the press itself (though the separation of labor and mechanical efficiency of the press should not be discounted). But since he basically released the entire thing as a "movable-type printing system", the printing press is often used as a stand-in for the entire production process.
I think the answer is that you mostly didn't, because it was cheaper/better to just carve the whole page in wood, which then acts as it's own press, and was the widespread technique used in Europe for images and short text before people tried moveable type.
So it's kind of like, why didn't we use electric cars in the 1900s, the answer is we did, but since something else was cheaper/better at that moment given the context all the decades of industrial innovation happened around that model, until there was a reason to revisit it much later. I think the Chinese inventors were like those early electric car makers. Really smart inventors, but just missing some key supporting infrastructure or need. Just like printing in Europe was held back by lack of paper.
> European printing presses of around 1600 were capable of producing between 1,500[47] and 3,600 impressions per workday.[3] By comparison, Far Eastern printing, where the back of the paper was manually rubbed to the page,[48] did not exceed an output of forty pages per day.[4]
Wikipedia has some contrasting info in their woodblock printing article though:
> only Europeans who had never seen Chinese woodblock printing in action tended to dismiss it, perhaps due to the almost instantaneous arrival of both xylography and movable type in Europe. The early Jesuit missionaries of late 16th century China, for instance, had a similar distaste for wood based printing for very different reasons. These Jesuits found that "the cheapness and omnipresence of printing in China made the prevailing wood-based technology extremely disturbing, even dangerous."[42] Matteo Ricci made note of "the exceedingly large numbers of books in circulation here and the ridiculously low prices at which they are sold."[43] Two hundred years later the Englishman John Barrow, by way of the Macartney mission to Qing China, also remarked with some amazement that the printing industry was "as free as in England, and the profession of printing open to everyone."[42] The commercial success and profitability of woodblock printing was attested to by one British observer at the end of the nineteenth century, who noted that even before the arrival of western printing methods, the price of books and printed materials in China had already reached an astoundingly low price compared to what could be found in his home country
Also interesting that the Korean moveable type was highly restricted, as mentioned elsewhere, so it's partly industrial technology and commerce but partly lack of censorship the Westerners are surprised by.
I mean, once you've arranged all your type onto a plate representing a page, what are you going to do with it except slap some ink on it and put paper against it? Is the difference that the Chinese just lay the paper manually over it rather than use a machine (the press) to do it?