It's not just the alphabet size, it's that you need many of each glyph to make a page, and it varies a lot. So also if you're using a Chinese character repeatedly in an essay, you're going to need lots of those glyphs to make that page, so you need really really huge collections of glyphs to make anything.
It's a game of scrabble essentially.
And in addition Gutenberg found an alloy using antimony, a metal nobody had any uses for in absolute, but was known to be toxic (anti-mony anti-monk killed the monks who volunteered for testing its toxicity, similar to the Jesuits with malaria, Catholic scientific testing). So he was a jeweller and he banged out an allow that slightly expanded when cooled, it was always the opposite until that point...I'm not sure if with bronze too. Antimony, tin and silver IIRC. So expensive glyphs, and further once the Americas started pumping out silver the economics of the printing press improved a lot, because it was silver-intensive.
Further, printing presses every now and then piss the fuck out of the ruler, when that happens the whole place gets confiscated so there go your millions of Chinese silver glyphs, and all the work into making them the typography, that's expensive. China is also centralized geographically, so censorship was too easily carried out, resistance was impossible. On the other hand in India it was too fragmented, no common language, also problematic for literacy, letters, glyph sets. Though they didn't do badly, China in terms of the development of books I would have to say did do badly, sometimes it's that simple. Invented paper, gunpowder, the compass, and gave them all away to Europe.
There's more to it, it made sense to have carved wood blocks in the context. I'll truncate here.
It's a game of scrabble essentially.
And in addition Gutenberg found an alloy using antimony, a metal nobody had any uses for in absolute, but was known to be toxic (anti-mony anti-monk killed the monks who volunteered for testing its toxicity, similar to the Jesuits with malaria, Catholic scientific testing). So he was a jeweller and he banged out an allow that slightly expanded when cooled, it was always the opposite until that point...I'm not sure if with bronze too. Antimony, tin and silver IIRC. So expensive glyphs, and further once the Americas started pumping out silver the economics of the printing press improved a lot, because it was silver-intensive.
Further, printing presses every now and then piss the fuck out of the ruler, when that happens the whole place gets confiscated so there go your millions of Chinese silver glyphs, and all the work into making them the typography, that's expensive. China is also centralized geographically, so censorship was too easily carried out, resistance was impossible. On the other hand in India it was too fragmented, no common language, also problematic for literacy, letters, glyph sets. Though they didn't do badly, China in terms of the development of books I would have to say did do badly, sometimes it's that simple. Invented paper, gunpowder, the compass, and gave them all away to Europe.
There's more to it, it made sense to have carved wood blocks in the context. I'll truncate here.