Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's special about the printing press is that it makes copying cheap; the comparable Roman technology was slavery, which makes labor cheap. (In the short term.)
That makes it even more remarkable, really, because the investment required to avoid automation is incredible. You need schools to prepare slaves as teachers (taught by slaves, of course) to teach child slaves to read and write and whatever specialist skills required by scribes. You need schools to teach the kids to read and you need slaves to produce sufficient excess food to support all the other slaves. And at the…
The vast majority of Roman slaves were miserable, illiterate war captives, and generations of their offspring, working large scale farms in Italy. The instability from Roman slavery actually came from the masses of displaced Roman yeoman farmers, who could not compete with the slave agribusinesses. This was a considerable concern in ancient Rome, for cultural reasons and also because these small farmers formed the backbone of the Roman legionary forces during the Republic.