New Reality Seeds

[Frost]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Has anyone thought about simply introducing paper from China to the West more quickly? It doesn't give anything like the bang you get from the paper/printing combo, but it would probably multiply the supply of books ten fold.

Introducing paper early enough possibly gets you a home grown printing industry in the west at a very early date.

The Romans appear to have been aware of printing (or at least stamping) as a way of decorating cloth. Given a relatively cheap medium to print onto I can easily see the same processes being modified in order to duplicate written texts.

The knock on effects of this are incalculable, aside from simply more texts surviving you potentially obtain a wider selection of surviving texts than ever existed in our history.

Unless there is some facet of Roman culture I am overlooking maturing print and paper making technologies are likely to have produced effects similar to maturing print technology in the 16th and 17th centuries. Historically this led to a significant rise in literacy and a corresponding increase in the distribution of ideas (at least amongst the middle classes) and a wider degree of public discourse on a number of subjects (ditto).