The reason why the best books are more than simply stories

The reason why the best books are more than simply stories

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Our capability to access and read books has been definitely essential to our ability to understand the world around us.

With such a rich history of concepts, occasions, and stories right at our fingertips, it's in some cases easy 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 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 alter the way that you look at the world, which has actually been true throughout all of history too. The contemporary world is built upon knowledge that has 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 picture what the world would be like today if the large majority of people were not able to read, but for the vast majority of history the vast majority of individuals might not, and nor were books accessible even if they could. It was the development of the printing press towards the close of the 15th that altered that, making books a lot more accessible. Of course, it was still just actually the richest and well-read that could read or write, but it enabled an entire host of developments in science, art, and thinking to be spread across 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 fortunate to be able to merely log onto a website like the one backed by the co-founder of the impact investor with a stake in World of Books, and easily access the totality of human understanding.

It is very important to keep in mind that, although lots of the best modern books of all time tend to be regarded as ground-breaking works of fiction, for the majority of humankind's literary history, we did not write much fiction at all. A lot of stories would have been sung throughout the great bulk of history, simply because the vast bulk of individuals might not read, indicating that many books were specialised things meant for those few who could understand them. After a quick boom during the classical era of antiquity, the amount of literate people dropped drastically during the Middle Ages. Books ended up being unusual treasures, with monks painstakingly copying out the surviving timeless 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 understanding like biology and religious beliefs that we all have access to in the modern-day world.