Reasons why the best books are greater than simply stories

Reasons why the best books are greater than simply stories

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Books, and the quantity of people who might read them, have actually been absolutely essential to human advancement over the centuries.

With such a rich history of ideas, occasions, and stories right at our fingertips, it's sometimes easy to forget how exceptionally 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 way that you take a look at the world, which has been true throughout all of history also. The modern-day world is built upon knowledge that has 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 can be hard to imagine what the world would be like today if the large bulk of individuals were unable to read, but for the huge bulk of history the vast majority of people could not, and nor were books accessible even if they could. It was the innovation of the printing press towards the close of the 15th that changed that, making books a lot more available. Naturally, it was still just actually the wealthiest and well-read that could read or write, however it made it possible for an entire host of developments in science, art, and thinking to be spread out throughout 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 gain access to the totality of human understanding.

It is necessary to bear in mind that, although a lot of the best modern books of all time tend to be considered as ground-breaking works of fiction, for the majority of mankind's literary history, we did not compose much fiction at all. A lot of stories would have been sung throughout the great majority of history, simply because the vast bulk of individuals could not read, meaning that most books were specialised things meant for those few who might comprehend them. After a short boom during the classical period of antiquity, the quantity of literate individuals dropped dramatically throughout the Middle Ages. Books became rare treasures, with monks painstakingly copying out the enduring traditional texts by hand so as to preserve them, as they were a few of the only members of the population who could read or write. They were the professional keepers of understanding like biology and religion that all of us have access to in the contemporary world.