Ways in which people reading books expanded knowledge

Ways in which people reading books expanded knowledge

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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's important to keep in mind 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. Many stories would have been sung throughout the great bulk of history, simply since the vast majority of individuals could not read, indicating that most books were specialised things meant for those few who might comprehend them. After a short boom throughout the classical era of antiquity, the amount of literate people dropped significantly throughout the Middle Ages. Books ended up being unusual treasures, with monks fastidiously copying out the surviving traditional texts by hand so as to maintain them, as they were some of the only members of the population who were able to read or write. They were the specialist keepers of understanding like biology and faith that we all have access to in the contemporary world.

With such an abundant history of ideas, events, and stories right at our fingertips, it's often 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 big percentage 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 change the way that you take a look at the world, which has actually been true throughout all of history also. The modern-day world is built on 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 not been for the books that changed minds across the ages.

It can be difficult to envision what the world would resemble today if the vast majority of people were unable to read, but for the huge majority of history the vast majority of people 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 changed that, making books a lot more available. Naturally, it was still just really the richest and well-educated that could read or write, but it allowed 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 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 easily access the totality of human knowledge.