Movable type actually proves the author's point. It was an amazing idea which didn't take off in China as fast as it did in the West, precisely because it was a huge hurdle to manufacture the ~1000s of blocks required to represent each Mandarin word.
See Wikipedia [1]. Movable type was first invented in China around A.D 1040, about four hundred years earlier than in the western world.
In Qing Dynasty, the government used it to print 64 sets of the encyclopedic Gujin Tushu Jicheng. Each set consisted of 5040 volumes, making a total of 322,560 volumes printed using movable type.
It should be noted that this Qing Dynasty encyclopedy was printed in 1726, seven centuries after the invention of movable type and more than 270 years after Gutenberg's Bible. It is also a Government sponsored project and probably wasn't cheap. The point still stands that compositing a book was far more labor intensive with chinese characters than with any alphabet. You need a few dozen types for an alphabet and at least 100 times more fore Chinese. An alphabet makes it considerably cheaper and not reserved to a tiny elite with 64 copies. That's the main point. Common people couldn't afford it.
There is no doubt possible that using an alphabet greatly helped the dissemination of knowledge. Between 1455 and 1500 there were over 30,000 distinct incunables edited in europe. Not 30,000 copies. More than 30,000 different books. [1]
Gutenberg's press went viral [2] and vastly more widespread than what was seen in Asia.
In the 15th century Korea adopted Hangul, the Korean alphabet.
"A potential solution to the linguistic and cultural bottleneck that held back movable type in Korea for 200 years appeared in the early 15th century—a generation before Gutenberg would begin working on his own movable-type invention in Europe—when Sejong the Great devised a simplified alphabet of 24 characters (hangul) for use by the common people, which could have made the typecasting and compositing process more feasible. Adoption of the new alphabet was stifled by Korea's cultural elite, who were "appalled at the idea of losing hanja, the badge of their elitism."
"It was effective enough at disseminating information among the uneducated that Yeonsangun, the paranoid tenth king, forbade the study or use of Hangul and banned Hangul documents in 1504,and King Jungjong abolished the Ministry of Eonmun (governmental institution related to Hangul research) in 1506.
The late 16th century, however, saw a revival of Hangul" [3]
