The way individuals reading books expanded knowledge

The way individuals reading books expanded knowledge

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

It can be hard to envision what the world would be like today if the vast bulk of people were unable to read, but for the large majority of history the huge bulk of people might 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 altered that, making books a lot more available. Obviously, it was still only actually the richest and well-educated that could read or write, however it enabled an entire host of advancements in science, art, and thinking to be spread out across great distances. Consider what would have taken place if the theory of gravity, or of evolution, could not have been dispersed across the globe. Human civilisation rests upon a foundation of books, and we are fortunate to be able to simply 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 gain access to the totality of human knowledge.

With such an abundant history of ideas, occasions, and stories right at our fingertips, it's in some cases simple 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 huge percentage 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 way that you take a look at the world, and that has actually been true throughout all of history also. The modern 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 actually not been for the books that changed minds across the ages.

It is very important to remember that, although lots of the best modern books of all time tend to be regarded as ground-breaking works of fiction, for most of mankind's literary history, we did not write much fiction at all. A lot of stories would have been sung throughout the great bulk of history, just due to the fact that the vast majority of individuals could not read, indicating that most books were specialised things meant for those few who could comprehend them. After a brief boom during the classical period of antiquity, the amount of literate individuals dropped considerably during the Middle Ages. Books became uncommon treasures, with monks painstakingly copying out the surviving timeless texts by hand so as to preserve 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.