Never ever before have actually books been so available as they are today in the modern-day world; keep reading to learn more.

With such a rich history of ideas, events, and stories right at our fingertips, it's sometimes 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 substantial percentage of all the books that have actually ever been composed (or the good ones at least). The best books of all time can easily change the way that you look at the world, and that has actually held true throughout all of history too. 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 plenty 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 write much fiction at all. Many stories would have been sung throughout the great majority of history, simply due to the fact that the huge bulk of people could not read, suggesting that the majority of books were specialised things meant for those few who might understand them. After a brief boom throughout the classical age of antiquity, the amount of literate individuals dropped dramatically throughout the Middle Ages. Books became rare treasures, with monks fastidiously 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 religious beliefs that we all have access to in the modern-day world.

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 innovation of the printing press towards the close of the 15th that altered that, making books a lot more accessible. Naturally, it was still only actually the wealthiest and well-educated that could read or write, however it enabled an entire host of advancements 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 actually been distributed around the world. 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.