Ways people reading books spread understanding

Ways people reading books spread understanding

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The world today is built upon an almost incomprehensible quantity of knowledge that has been handed down in books.

With such an abundant history of concepts, occasions, and stories right at our fingertips, it's sometimes easy to forget how exceptionally 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 proportion of all the books that have ever been written (or the good ones at the very least). The best books of all time can quickly alter the way that you look at the world, and that has held true throughout all of history too. The modern-day world is built upon knowledge that has 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 throughout the ages.

It's important to remember that, although lots of the best modern books of all time tend to be considered ground-breaking works of fiction, for the majority of mankind's literary history, we did not compose much fiction at all. The majority of stories would have been sung throughout the great majority of history, simply because the large majority of people could not read, indicating that a lot of books were specialised things meant for those few who might comprehend them. After a quick boom throughout the classical period of antiquity, the quantity of literate people dropped dramatically during the Middle Ages. Books became rare treasures, with monks painstakingly copying out the surviving classic texts by hand so as to preserve them, as they were some of the only members of the populace who could read or write. They were the specialist keepers of knowledge like biology and religion that we all have access to in the modern world.

It can be hard to imagine what the world would be like today if the vast majority of people were unable to read, but for the huge bulk of history the huge 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 altered that, making books a lot more accessible. Obviously, it was still only really the richest and well-read that could read or write, however it made it possible for an entire host of developments in science, art, and thinking to be spread out across great distances. Consider what would have happened 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 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 easily gain access to the totality of human understanding.