The key reasons why people having books to read constructed the modern world

The key reasons why people having books to read constructed the modern world

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The world today is built on a practically incomprehensible quantity of knowledge that has been handed down in books.

With such a rich history of ideas, events, and stories right at our fingertips, it's sometimes easy to forget how incredibly 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 proportion of all the books that have actually ever been composed (or the good ones at least). The best books of all time can easily alter the manner in which you take a look at the world, and that has held true throughout all of history too. The modern-day world is built on 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 actually not been for the books that changed minds across the ages.

It can be tough to envision what the world would be like today if the vast bulk of individuals were not able to read, but for the vast bulk of history the large majority of people might 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 altered that, making books a lot more accessible. Of course, it was still just truly the richest and well-read that could read or write, however it enabled an entire host of advancements in science, art, and thinking to be spread throughout great distances. Consider what would have occurred if the theory of gravity, or of evolution, could not have been dispersed around the world. Human civilisation rests upon a foundation of books, and we are fortunate to be able to just 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 access the totality of human understanding.

It is very important to keep in mind that, although plenty of the best modern books of all time tend to be considered as ground-breaking works of fiction, for most of humanity's literary history, we did not compose much fiction at all. Many stories would have been sung throughout the great bulk of history, just because the large majority of individuals could not read, suggesting that many books were specialised things meant for those few who could comprehend them. After a brief boom throughout the classical era of antiquity, the quantity of literate individuals dropped drastically during the Middle Ages. Books ended up being rare treasures, with monks fastidiously copying out the surviving timeless texts by hand so as to preserve them, as they were a few of the only members of the populace who were able to read or write. They were the specialist keepers of understanding like biology and religion that all of us have access to in the modern-day world.