I think Hobbes is right there, if you include the "compared with the invention of letters" part of his sentiment.

Writing as a whole is a more difficult, more consequential, and more culturally challenging invention than printing (even though printing is definitely all three of those things).

Before print (and after it but not yet relying on it) we had literacy, schools, mathematics, written personal and scientific correspondence, accounting, and to some extent written legislation and written accounts of legal and governmental decisions. All of those things were definitely expensive and largely elite phenomena in many places, but they were all real and had enormous impacts. People today still avidly study sacred texts that were written down hundreds and even thousands of years before the advent of printing, as well as history and literature from the same timeframe.

Thomas Hobbes had his own works printed during his lifetime, so I don't think he meant to suggest that printing was a useless curiosity.

You can probably find much more naive and categorical dismissals of printing from around that time. :-)

(Also, I think you might mean "century" rather than "generation".)

Agreed. Also prior to writing there was also folklore, which was surprisingly accurate: there have been many major events from folklore verified by science (earthquakes, astrological events, extreme weather / floods, etc.) IIRC in some cases (Australian aborigines) well over 5,000 years ago (they have been in Australia for 60,000 years!). FWIW I meant generation in the sense of a generation of communications technology, rather than a human. Who measures in human lifespans these days? Hehe.

Folklore does work, but it’s incredibly lossy and low bandwidth. It’s incredible how little of the aborigine history for the 40k years was preserved, even taking into account the mass murder of many of the elders.