so I wrote this in response to a now-deleted comment which asked a follow-up question about the fears of the Reformation. I would add that I'm not familiar with the monastic context specifically, nor with other types of text copied, e.g. works of philosophy, theology, the Bible, but I do know that printing was handled by secular printing houses, which from the date of implemenation of Quo Primum (issued in 1570, but not necessarily enforced right away) then had to receive permission from the Holy See to print the liturgical books and had to print them faithfully or would be fined.

The church embraced printing as early as 1474, when the Missale Romanum consuetudinem curiae romanae (that is, the Roman missal, the book containing all of the prayers and readings for the Mass in one single volume, according to the usage of the Roman Curia, the body of priests and other clergy that handle the administrative work of the papacy) was printed for the first time at Milan. This was a really big deal, because the MR of the Roman curia was also that used by the Friars Minor, that is, the Franciscans, who were the first religious order to not use their own liturgy or the usage of the place. In the Earlier Rule, they did in fact use whatever was available to them, from 1209 to 1223 (and certainly from 1221, from whence the Earlier Rule as revised dates), but in the Later Rule, the actual Rule of St Francis as we know it, issued by Pope Honorius III, changes this to the usage of the Roman curia.

Long story short, it's a bit of a weird problem with the Franciscan insistance on poverty above all (whether as a means or as an end, a problem that will plague them throughout the 14th century), because at first, the idea was that the Franciscans should not own their own liturgical books and therefore should borrow whatever is given to them in the churches where they minister, but then it was decided that it would be better to have their own books, giving them more freedom in their ministry, and since the community poverty was slightly alleviated, this didn't threaten the individual poverty of each friar.

In contrast to the Friars Minor, the Order of Preachers, founded by St Dominic around the same time as St Francis and the Franciscans, traditionally used its own proper liturgy, not too different from the Norman liturgical tradition which spread in France and Spain (St Dominic was Spanish) and therefore meets both qualifications.

So to come back to the Franciscans, it meant copying the Roman liturgical books (as modified for the Franciscans over time) in order to celebrate the liturgy no matter where they found themselves. At the time, every diocese had its proper liturgy, and not just local feast days that might have special chants or prayers unique to this or that place, but entirely different ceremonies, entirely different texts absent from the books of Rome, etc.

So, yeah, you needed a copy of the Roman books to give to the printer, but it was much easier to carry those and to print them in other places than it was to carry the handcopied books and to copy those again.

The lead-up and aftermath of the Reformation is quite interesting. The Fifth Lateran Council was generally positive towards printing, even though it called for restrictions on certain kinds of books to avoid spreading error, heresy, etc. On a positive note (and see basically everything that Eamon Duffy ever wrote, especially The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400-1580 and Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers, 1240–1570) the books of hours were printed among all social classes. A book of hours is a book which contains prayers for the various "hours" of the day, which correspond to the seven services of the liturgical day (Matins-Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline), which include prayers for the canonical office that changes daily, the Office of the Blessed Virgin, or of the Dead, as well as prayers for the Mass, particularly since the elevation of the Host had become a very big deal in the 14th century. Despite the Reformation and the course of time, there are many books of hours which survived in whole or in part.

England's clerics embraced printing, so basically all of the liturgy of Sarum (Latin for Salisbury) survived, even after the Reformation, and in fact has been reprinted, edited, and translated (or is going to be translated) in both more scholarly or academic editions and editions usable by clergy. In fact, to slightly contradict what I've said, Sarum was widely used in England outside of Salisbury's territory itself, and Henry VIII imposed it on the entire kingdom, in part because it was already widely available; on the eve of the Reformation, the same phenomenon applied to York in the north and to a lesser degree, Bangor in Wales.

This isn't to say that other bishops rejected printing, simply that it was particularly effective in England, which is the area which I know best.

As to the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation/Catholic Reformation/Early Modern Catholicism, Elizabeth Eistenstein's 2011 book Divine Art, Infernal Machine gives a good, if brief, look at this in addition to her earlier book The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (though the second book is much better IMHO). One classical line of thought is that the Reformation necessitated centralization along the lines of Lateran V's idea, that the printing press allowed heretical materials to spread. But there's also an argument that it wasn't even heresy, just material that was of an inferior quality to the traditional texts.

In the late 1520s, a Spanish cardinal named Quiñones was permitted to revise the breviary for private usage, eliminating most of the non-Scriptural texts and most of the parts which were not the psalms, and he spread out the texts significantly, as the 150 psalms are traditionally prayed in one week. This was a very popular book that was not entirely suppressed until 1568, when a new edition of the Breviarium Romanum was issued in the wake of the Council of Trent, before which John of Arze, a Spanish theologian, had criticized this reduced breviary on the lines which I've given above, in a statement drafted in 1551.