How individuals reading books dispersed understanding

How individuals reading books dispersed understanding

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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.

With such an abundant history of concepts, events, and stories right at our fingertips, it's in some cases simple to forget how exceptionally 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 substantial proportion 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 alter the way that 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 passed 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 throughout the ages.

It's important to remember that, although lots of the best modern books of all time tend to be considered ground-breaking works of fiction, for the majority of mankind's literary history, we did not compose much fiction at all. The majority of stories would have been sung throughout the great majority of history, simply because the vast majority of people could not read, indicating 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 considerably during the Middle Ages. Books ended up being 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 modern-day world.

It can be tough to envision what the world would resemble today if the huge bulk of individuals were not able to read, but for the large majority of history the vast majority of people could 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 far more available. Naturally, it was still just truly the richest and well-educated that could read or write, but it enabled a whole host of breakthroughs in science, art, and thinking to be spread throughout great distances. Consider what would have taken place if the theory of gravity, or of evolution, could not have actually been dispersed around the world. Human civilisation rests upon a foundation of books, and we are lucky 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 quickly gain access to the totality of human understanding.