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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Our capability to access and read books has been definitely essential to our ability 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 easy to forget how incredibly 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 proportion of all the books that have ever been composed (or the good ones at the very least). The best books of all time can easily change the manner in which you look at the world, which has held true throughout all of history too. The modern world is built on understanding 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 actually not been for the books that changed minds across the ages.

It can be difficult to envision what the world would be like today if the huge majority of people were unable to read, but for the vast majority of history the huge majority of individuals might not, and nor were books available 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. Naturally, it was still just really the richest and well-read that could read or write, but 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 distributed around the world. Human civilisation rests upon a foundation of books, and we are lucky to be able to merely 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 knowledge.

It's important to bear in mind that, although lots of the best modern books of all time tend to be regarded as ground-breaking works of fiction, for the majority of humankind's literary history, we did not compose much fiction at all. A lot of stories would have been sung throughout the great majority of history, merely since the huge bulk of people might not read, implying that the majority of books were specialised things meant for those few who could comprehend them. After a short boom during the classical age of antiquity, the amount of literate people dropped significantly throughout the Middle Ages. Books became uncommon treasures, with monks meticulously copying out the enduring traditional texts by hand so as to maintain them, as they were some of the only members of the population who could read or write. They were the professional keepers of knowledge like biology and faith that we all have access to in the modern-day world.