Precisely why people having books to read constructed the modern world

Precisely why people having books to read constructed the modern world

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

It can be hard to envision what the world would be like today if the vast bulk of people were not able to read, but for the huge bulk of history the vast majority of individuals could not, and nor were books accessible even if they could. It was the invention of the printing press towards the close of the 15th that changed that, making books far more accessible. Of course, it was still just actually the richest and well-educated that could read or write, however it allowed a whole host of developments in science, art, and thinking to be spread out throughout great distances. Consider what would have happened if the theory of gravity, or of evolution, could not have actually been dispersed around the world. Human civilisation rests upon a foundation of books, and we are lucky to be able to merely log onto a website like the one backed by the co-founder of the impact investor with a stake in World of Books, and easily gain access to the totality of human understanding.

With such a rich history of concepts, occasions, and stories right at our fingertips, it's sometimes simple to forget how extremely fortunate 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 huge percentage of all the books that have ever been composed (or the good ones at least). The best books of all time can quickly change the manner in which you look at the world, which has actually been true throughout all of history too. The contemporary world is built on knowledge that has actually been passed 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 actually not been for the books that changed minds across the ages.

It's important to keep in mind that, although a lot of the best modern books of all time tend to be considered ground-breaking works of fiction, for the majority of humankind's literary history, we did not compose much fiction at all. Many stories would have been sung throughout the great bulk of history, simply since the vast bulk of individuals could not read, meaning that many books were specialised things meant for those few who might understand them. After a quick boom during the classical period of antiquity, the amount of literate people dropped considerably during the Middle Ages. Books ended up being rare treasures, with monks meticulously copying out the enduring traditional texts by hand so as to maintain them, as they were some of the only members of the population who could read or write. They were the expert keepers of understanding like biology and religion that we all have access to in the modern-day world.