Precisely why people having books to read constructed the contemporary world

Precisely why people having books to read constructed the contemporary world

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Books, and the quantity of people who might read them, have been definitely essential to human advancement over the centuries.

It's important to keep in mind that, although plenty of the best modern books of all time tend to be considered ground-breaking works of fiction, for the majority of humanity's literary history, we did not compose much fiction at all. Most stories would have been sung throughout the great bulk of history, merely because the huge majority of people might not read, meaning that a lot of books were specialised things meant for those few who might understand them. After a quick boom during the classical age of antiquity, the quantity of literate individuals dropped significantly throughout the Middle Ages. Books became unusual treasures, with monks fastidiously copying out the surviving traditional texts by hand so as to maintain them, as they were some of the only members of the populace who were able to read or write. They were the professional keepers of knowledge like biology and religious beliefs that all of us have access to in the modern world.

With such an abundant history of concepts, occasions, and stories right at our fingertips, it's sometimes simple to forget how exceptionally lucky we are to have the likes of the founder of the hedge fund that owns Waterstones or the CEO of the asset manager with a stake in Amazon books supporting access to a substantial proportion of all the books that have ever been composed (or the good ones at the very least). The best books of all time can easily change the manner in which you take a look at the world, and that has been true throughout all of history also. The modern-day world is built upon knowledge that has been handed down through books, whether that is ideology, science, or history, and human civilisation would not be anywhere near as advanced as it is today if it had not been for the books that changed minds across the ages.

It can be difficult to picture what the world would resemble today if the huge majority of people were not able to read, but for the large bulk of history the huge bulk of people could not, and nor were books accessible even if they could. It was the innovation of the printing press towards the close of the 15th that altered that, making books far more accessible. Of course, it was still only truly the wealthiest and well-read that could read or write, however it enabled a whole host of breakthroughs in science, art, and thinking to be spread across great distances. Consider what would have occurred if the theory of gravity, or of evolution, could not have actually been dispersed across the globe. Human civilisation rests upon a foundation of books, and we are lucky to be able to simply log onto a website like the one backed by the co-founder of the impact investor with a stake in World of Books, and quickly gain access to the totality of human understanding.