Abstract
The historians of early printing in Hebrew characters mostly emphasize the revolutionary character of the new medium, in consonance with the general assessment of the invention of the printing press, which is rather obsolete. This paper draws attention to the high number of unsuccessful publishing projects in the period when the printing in Hebrew characters became relatively widespread (during the second decade of the 16th century, the Bomberg press started its activities in Venice and the Prague print shop introduced the new technology to Jewish East-Central Europe).
Using quantitative methods but combining them with qualitative analysis in the steps of the "sociology of text", the paper concludes that the the printed book did not revolutionize the Jewish literacy because of the prevailing traditional reading practices, which favoured intensive reading of few texts instead of selective and extensive reading of many texts.