Reasons why people having books to read developed the modern world

Reasons why people having books to read developed the modern world

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Our capability to access and read books has been definitely crucial to our capability to understand the world around us.

It is very important to remember that, although lots of the best modern books of all time tend to be considered as ground-breaking works of fiction, for most of humankind's literary history, we did not compose much fiction at all. Most stories would have been sung throughout the great majority of history, just due to the fact that the vast majority of individuals could not read, implying that a lot of books were specialised things meant for those few who might understand them. After a short boom throughout the classical period of antiquity, the amount of literate individuals dropped drastically throughout the Middle Ages. Books ended up being rare treasures, with monks painstakingly copying out the surviving timeless texts by hand so as to maintain them, as they were a few of the only members of the populace who could read or write. They were the expert keepers of understanding like biology and faith that all of us have access to in the modern world.

With such a rich history of ideas, events, and stories right at our fingertips, it's in some cases easy 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 substantial percentage of all the books that have ever been written (or the good ones at least). The best books of all time can easily change the way that you look at the world, which has actually held 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 actually not been for the books that changed minds throughout the ages.

It can be tough to envision what the world would resemble today if the large bulk of people were not able to read, but for the vast majority of history the vast bulk of individuals might not, and nor were books available even if they could. It was the creation of the printing press towards the close of the 15th that changed that, making books much more accessible. Of course, it was still just actually the wealthiest and well-read that could read or write, but it enabled a whole host of breakthroughs in science, art, and thinking to be spread out throughout great distances. Consider what would have occurred if the theory of gravity, or of evolution, could not have been distributed around the world. Human civilisation rests upon a structure 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 knowledge.