A holy Torah is written on a scroll. The text is written by hand and contains 304,805 Hebrew letters. If the scribe makes a single mistake, that page must be removed from the scroll and buried in the earth. A new page is then sewed into the scroll. The finished scroll is kept in an “Ark” on the side of the synagogue that faces Jerusalem. The scroll is brought out only on special holidays to be read or danced with.
The earliest known printed book (using carved wood block printing) was the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, produced in China in the 800s. The first book made with a moveable type printing press was the Gutenberg Bible, produced in Germany in the 1400s. Before this all books were copied by hand or memorized.
The art of typesetting printed books has revolutionized how information is recorded and disseminated. In the digital age we are now using codes like HTML (which is the language used to build this website) in order to publish our words.