The reason why the best books are more than simply stories

The reason why the best books are more than simply stories

Blog Article

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

With such an abundant history of ideas, events, and stories right at our fingertips, it's in some cases simple to forget how incredibly 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 huge proportion of all the books that have ever been composed (or the good ones at the very least). The best books of all time can easily change the manner in which you take a look at the world, which has been true throughout all of history also. The modern-day world is built on knowledge that has been passed 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 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 write much fiction at all. Most stories would have been sung throughout the great majority of history, just due to the fact that the huge majority of people could not read, implying that a lot of books were specialised things meant for those few who might comprehend them. After a quick boom during the classical era of antiquity, the amount of literate people dropped drastically throughout the Middle Ages. Books ended up being uncommon treasures, with monks painstakingly copying out the surviving classic texts by hand so as to preserve them, as they were some of the only members of the populace who could read or write. They were the expert keepers of understanding like biology and faith 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 unable to read, but for the large bulk of history the large bulk of individuals might not, and nor were books available even if they could. It was the development 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 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 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 access the totality of human knowledge.