Let's walk through this shall we? Later in the thread someone notes:
" a press rather than a stamp or stencil, movable type, variety of ink. And the title page (a few decades post-Gutenberg) was unique to European book culture."

So - beginning with a press. Did it matter? 1/ https://twitter.com/tlecaque/status/1303718021450657793

Ok, so the European printing press is an important innovation - but it's job was simple: apply tons of pressure to create a print.
Why was that pressure so important? The papers were really different. Chinese paper let you pull prints quickly and easily without tons of force 2/

Therefore, the Chinese never would have needed a press - but printing speeds were virtually the same.

Movable type: we got it, they got it, what's the diff? That's easy, but no one says it: that sweet, sweet matrix system https://www.3dhotbed.info/punchmatrixsystem

By casting type + having a small character set, you could produce fonts relatively cheaply (but not that cheaply - think of how long it took the English to get serious about producing their own type!). However- prices per page for xylographically printed vs movable were the same

On to ink: give me that sweet pure-carbon "india" ink any day. Easy to make, easy to use. Sure, it doesn't stick to metal (unless you add oil), but it's totally permanent, not acidic, and easy to transport.

Here is a title page from the 13th century.... From vernacular, illustrated fiction... So that can't be it!

So back to the original question: why does the printing press end up being a big deal in Europe? There are lots of ways to answer this: puny countries with porous borders competing, the collapse of ecclesiastical authority, infusions of capital from colonization, etc.

Another way to flip this is: what different structures did these forms of printing enable? In China, printing could crop up basically anywhere with wood + people with time to carve. Many farmers printed books to supplement household income. Big firms existed, but not a Plantin

On the other hand - blocks could be used for hundreds of years - and they were! So be wary of any attempts that show how "Europeans produced Y times more editions than the Chinese." I mean, what does edition mean for xylography?

In sum - thinking comparatively is useful and fun, but only if you actually know about each end of the comparison. Think about how irrelevant the history of movable type looks from East Asia. It basically occupied 70 years between xylography to and the digital age...

Anyways, my book project is about this - and issues of "comparison" in histories of the book. Most of these topics will be treated in detail.

If you're a real glutton for punishment - here is a history of information in East Asia told from a relatively Sinocentric perspecitive (and I believe, the first attempt to create a narrative like this...) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_R2NbXJcaMU63Z1N5mgg_ZpRJMRlVlSg/view?usp=sharing