Before Movable Type
For most of recorded history, reproducing a text meant copying it by hand. Scribal production set a hard ceiling on how widely any document could circulate: a manuscript took months, cost the equivalent of substantial property, and introduced fresh errors with every generation of copying.
Woodblock printing, developed in China and in use for Buddhist texts by the seventh century CE, offered the first real alternative. A whole page was carved in relief on a single block, inked, and pressed. The economics were attractive for texts that would be reprinted many times, and the technique suited a writing system with thousands of characters. Its weakness was equally clear: the block encoded one specific page and nothing else, so a new edition meant carving the whole thing again.
The conceptual leap of movable type was to separate the smallest reusable unit, the individual character, from the page it happened to appear on.