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

Blog Article

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

With such an abundant history of concepts, events, and stories right at our fingertips, it's in some cases 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 written (or the good ones at the very least). The best books of all time can quickly alter the manner in which you look at the world, and that has been true throughout all of history also. The modern-day world is built on knowledge that has been passed down through books, whether that is philosophy, 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 is necessary to remember that, although plenty 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. The majority of stories would have been sung throughout the great bulk of history, simply because the vast majority of people could not read, implying 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 considerably throughout 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 tough to envision what the world would resemble today if the huge bulk of individuals were unable to read, but for the huge bulk of history the large majority of people 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 available. Naturally, it was still just truly the richest and well-educated 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 actually been distributed across the globe. Human civilisation rests upon a foundation of books, and we are fortunate 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.