At least 20,000,000 books had already been printed in Europe by 1500, and as many as 200,000,000 had been manufactured by 1600. A consequence of this was that More or less fixed written versions of French, German and English were removed from the wide range of languages ​​spoken in Europe during this period. Profit was fatal to European linguistic diversity. Publishers would not produce translations of Luther's sermons in all the dialect variations of the French countryside; rather, they translated them into the written language “French”, which French scholars then had to learn. These new printed languages ​​created unified fields of exchange and communication in a way that offered an entirely new form of imagined community. Written language was a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of nationalism (p..