Reddit mentions of Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (The Modern Jewish Experience)

Fair enough, the printing press surely afforded a special sort of command over knowledge within Europe, and it did take a little while for it's use to become prevalent in the Middle East.

Although, I would be wary of making this a complete answer. From my understanding (and this is stretching my own historical knowledge, so feel free to correct me), much of the printing production was still limited to religious texts, literacy was incredibly low, and the ability to print materials was largely limited to a very wealthy elite. It would seem to me that until printing became a true mass phenomena that its utility for knowledge transmission would not have surpassed oral or handwritten communication.

Naturally, there were innovations in Europe that occurred there for specific reasons, but that doesn't mean there weren't significant networks of scientific inquiry in the Middle East at the same time -- it's just that they probably relied much more heavily on oral communication than written. I would argue that even as late as the 16th or 17th century you could learn as much in a Sufi lodge or an Istanbul coffeehouse as you could in a European university. To frame the question around specific innovations is a bit arbitrary I think.

Case in point being, once the printing press became a mass phenomena in the Ottoman Empire (by the mid-19th century), they caught up pretty fast.

If anyone's interested in a great discussion about Ottoman printing (focused on the Qur'an, but ranging into the popular press as well), see this interview with Brett Wilson from Macalester. It does a good job of explaining why, as some have suggested here, the delay of the printing press' arrival to the Ottoman Empire had little to do with religion.

Some other interesting books on the Ottoman Press:

Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Making Jews Modern

Ami Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East

If you're looking for something a little more niche I could recommend Making Jews Modern by Stein. It's about the advent of Yiddish and Ladino media culture in late 19th-early 20th century Europe. There's also Lithuanian Yeshivas of the Nineteenth Century by Stampfer it's pretty academic and detailed but it's a really interesting read on the development of the modern yeshiva system. There's the multi-volume Polin Studies in Polish Jewry series which is really great and covers practically every topic there is on the subject. Most of them can be found on Amazon as well. The Litvaks by Levin is a great work that covers the extensive history of Lithuanian Jewry with particular focus on the 18th century onward. Also check out practically any of the books available in the Yiddish Book Center's online store.