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.

With such a rich history of ideas, occasions, and stories right at our fingertips, it's sometimes 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 proportion of all the books that have ever been composed (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 held true throughout all of history too. 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 across the ages.

It is essential to keep in mind that, although a lot of the best modern books of all time tend to be considered as ground-breaking works of fiction, for the majority 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, just due to the fact that the huge 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 dramatically during the Middle Ages. Books became rare treasures, with monks painstakingly copying out the surviving traditional texts by hand so as to protect them, as they were some of the only members of the populace who could read or write. They were the expert keepers of understanding like biology and religious beliefs that all of us have access to in the contemporary world.

It can be difficult to picture what the world would resemble today if the large majority of people were not able to read, but for the vast majority of history the vast majority of people might 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 far more available. Naturally, it was still just truly the wealthiest and well-educated that could read or write, however it allowed a whole host of advancements in science, art, and thinking to be spread across great distances. Consider what would have happened if the theory of gravity, or of evolution, could not have been dispersed around the world. Human civilisation rests upon a structure of books, and we are fortunate to be able to merely log onto a site like the one backed by the co-founder of the impact investor with a stake in World of Books, and quickly access the totality of human knowledge.