Ways people reading books proliferated knowledge

Ways people reading books proliferated knowledge

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The world today is built upon a practically incomprehensible quantity of knowledge that has been handed down in books.

It can be difficult to imagine what the world would resemble today if the large majority of individuals were not able to read, but for the huge bulk of history the vast bulk 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 altered that, making books a lot more accessible. Obviously, it was still only actually the richest and well-read that could read or write, but it enabled an entire host of breakthroughs 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 sometimes simple to forget how incredibly 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 actually ever been written (or the good ones at the very least). The best books of all time can quickly change the manner in which you look at the world, which has held true throughout all of history too. The contemporary world is built on knowledge that has actually 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 across the ages.

It is necessary to remember that, although a lot of the best modern books of all time tend to be regarded as ground-breaking works of fiction, for the majority 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 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 quantity of literate individuals dropped drastically throughout the Middle Ages. Books became 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 populace who were able to read or write. They were the professional keepers of knowledge like biology and religious beliefs that all of us have access to in the modern world.