The way individuals reading books dispersed understanding

The way individuals reading books dispersed understanding

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The world today is built upon an almost incomprehensible quantity of understanding that has been passed down in books.

It is essential to bear in mind that, although lots of the best modern books of all time tend to be considered 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 majority of history, just due to the fact that the vast bulk of people could not read, suggesting that many books were specialised things meant for those few who might understand them. After a short boom throughout the classical age of antiquity, the quantity of literate individuals dropped drastically throughout the Middle Ages. Books became unusual 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 could read or write. They were the expert keepers of understanding like biology and religion that all of us have access to in the modern-day world.

With such a rich history of concepts, occasions, and stories right at our fingertips, it's sometimes easy to forget how exceptionally 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 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 been true throughout all of history too. The modern-day world is built upon knowledge that has actually 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 individuals were unable to read, but for the huge majority of history the vast 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 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 across the globe. 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 gain access to the totality of human understanding.