Ways people reading books spread understanding

Ways people reading books spread understanding

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

It is very important to bear in mind that, although a lot of the best modern books of all time tend to be regarded as ground-breaking works of fiction, for most of humanity's literary history, we did not write much fiction at all. Many stories would have been sung throughout the great majority of history, simply since the large majority of people could not read, implying that many books were specialised things meant for those few who could understand them. After a short boom during the classical age of antiquity, the amount of literate individuals dropped significantly 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 a few of the only members of the population who were able to read or write. They were the professional keepers of understanding like biology and religious beliefs that all of us have access to in the contemporary world.

It can be difficult to imagine what the world would be like today if the vast bulk of individuals were unable to read, but for the large bulk of history the large majority of people could not, and nor were books available even if they could. It was the development of the printing press towards the close of the 15th that altered that, making books a lot more accessible. Of course, it was still only actually the wealthiest and well-read that could read or write, but it enabled a whole host of developments 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.

With such a rich history of ideas, occasions, and stories right at our fingertips, it's often simple to forget how extremely 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 huge percentage of all the books that have actually ever been written (or the good ones at least). The best books of all time can easily alter the manner in which you look at the world, and that has actually held true throughout all of history as well. The modern-day world is built on knowledge that has been handed 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 not been for the books that changed minds throughout the ages.