what you’re doing right now: reading a book. Books influence the world largely because a man named Johannes Gutenberg had ideas about their importance. He acted on those ideas by inventing a printing system that used movable type to rapidly reproduce words on the printed page. His innovations changed the world. Gutenberg’s genius as an inventor was just the beginning of the story. Gutenberg saw printing as a means of rapidly spreading God’s truth. He hoped that the printing press would “win every