That page numbers in books were only invented 50 years after the printing press is a fun snippet from the article

observationist 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sometime after 685 AD, they invented spaces between words. All text - in Latin to that point, mostly - was written in scriptio continua.

All sorts of ambiguity and hilarity would ensue; to be a good writer, you needed to ensure that words didn't bleed together and form incorrect meanings in unintended combinations. If you lost your place when reading, you'd have to know generally where you were in a scroll, and restart from a place you remembered.

Kinda crazy to think how difficult it would be to cross reference things and do collaborative research with no spaces or pages.

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wl 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Hittite was putting spaces between words in the 17th century BCE. And if we're just interested in Latin, it used the interpunct as a word divider hundreds of years before the use of the space as word divider happened. The use of scriptio continua despite knowledge of word dividers was a choice.

	▲	observationist 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I wonder, how much was gatekeeping, keeping things hard on purpose, how much waas inertia, "that's just the way things are done", and how much was a kind of despairing "holy shit, it'd be so much work to have to go through and recopy everything in the new format, literally decades of effort, and there's other things we want to do with our lives". The whole context of written words had so much implicit process and knowledge and institutional memory, compared to now when we have petabytes of throwaway logs and trivial scratchpads for software running on a "just in case I might need to figure something out" basis. I'd love to see a written word graph over time, starting ~4k BC to now. And the complexity and diversity of those automated words are going up like crazy since LLMs.

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datsci_est_2015 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Also kind of crazy how long “but that’s the way we’ve always done it” can remain the dominant system, despite a revolutionary change being so trivially achievable. This required absolutely no technological advancement, literally just putting a little more space between letters to reduce ambiguity.

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mistrial9 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

yeah - under certain "the winners write the history" framework, I believe that scribes did not add spaces between "words".. However, the world is a big place; history is long.

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BurningFrog an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I can see how it wculd take that long to realize it would be nice to have a way to tell people which page to look at in their exact copy of a book.

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swalsh 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Many times obvious things are only obvious once you see them. Like roller suitcases.

	▲	bookofjoe 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		See also: the wheel

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ssivark 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The early printing press was probably focused on short few page documents (an increasing scale), and it wouldn't be surprising if page numbers were a solution to help printers not mix up pages.

	▲	adrian_b 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Your hypothesis does not match history, because the early printing was focused on things that had a potentially large market, which at that time meant books like The Bible, with a lot of pages. The parent article mentions that binding the pages of the first bibles in the correct order, in the absence of page numbers, was an extremely tedious work. That is why page numbers have invented many years later, exactly as you say, "to help printers not mix up pages".
	▲	observationist 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The Gutenberg Bible was one of the first mass produced books - no page numbers on early copies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible#/media/File:Gu... Hindsight is 20/20 , lol. There are so many obvious, effective constructs and functions in modern English, we kinda miss the absolute janky mess of hacking and tradition and arbitrary rules and facepalm moments that went in to the last 1500+ years of development, let alone the tens of thousands of years prior.