> The printing press changed the world but it was huge expensive hardware and if you had one it meant you were a major industry player and therefore an easy target for copyright enforcement.

I do suspect you are thinking about the industrial revolution, which came centuries later. Like 1760+

The Gutenberg press was something that relatively poor could produce, over time, in pieces with basic carpentry and blacksmithing (if you had the money), in the mid 1400s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLctAw4JZXE

You could make it even cheaper with purely wooden components (no double sided, sorry), which would require routine repair and was generally inefficient. Paper had been around since before the Egyptians but started becoming commonly understood and circulated in Germany around this time. It was difficult to obtain and make. Interestingly enough, you could use cloth/leather or another material instead. Gutenberg was relatively well funded once he started kicking out Bibles so he didn't think about these things, as he really just wanted nice Bibles produced. Innovative stop-gaps were part of how it's notoriety spread so rapidly. That left the traditional oil-based ink which could reasonably be made of anything (oil, sap, soot, filth, etc) with effort and a suitable substrate.

Printing was manual before, which was slow and expensive. Within a century of "the press", the ability to read was nearly ubiquitous. This jump-started the Enlightenment period.