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

With such an abundant history of concepts, occasions, and stories right at our fingertips, it's sometimes 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 huge proportion of all the books that have ever been written (or the good ones at least). The best books of all time can easily change the way that you take a look at the world, which has actually held true throughout all of history too. The modern-day world is built on understanding 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 actually not been for the books that changed minds throughout the ages.

It can be tough to envision what the world would resemble today if the huge bulk of individuals were unable to read, but for the huge bulk of history the huge bulk of individuals might not, and nor were books available even if they could. It was the creation of the printing press towards the close of the 15th that altered that, making books a lot more available. Obviously, it was still only truly the richest and well-educated that could read or write, but it enabled a whole host of developments in science, art, and thinking to be spread out throughout great distances. Consider what would have taken place if the theory of gravity, or of evolution, could not have actually been distributed across the globe. Human civilisation rests upon a foundation of books, and we are lucky 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 knowledge.

It is essential to keep in mind that, although plenty 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 compose much fiction at all. Many stories would have been sung throughout the great majority of history, simply due to the fact that the huge majority of people might not read, suggesting that a lot of books were specialised things meant for those few who could understand them. After a quick boom throughout the classical age of antiquity, the amount of literate people dropped drastically during the Middle Ages. Books became uncommon treasures, with monks meticulously copying out the surviving classic 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 expert keepers of knowledge like biology and faith that all of us have access to in the modern world.