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

With such a rich history of concepts, events, and stories right at our fingertips, it's in some cases easy to forget how extremely 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 big 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 easily alter the manner in which you look at the world, which has actually been true throughout all of history also. The modern world is built upon understanding that has actually 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 across the ages.

It is very important to remember that, although lots of the best modern books of all time tend to be considered as ground-breaking works of fiction, for the majority of humanity's literary history, we did not compose much fiction at all. The majority of 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, suggesting that most books were specialised things meant for those few who could understand them. After a short boom throughout the classical period of antiquity, the amount of literate individuals dropped significantly throughout the Middle Ages. Books ended up being uncommon treasures, with monks painstakingly copying out the surviving traditional texts by hand so as to protect them, as they were a few of the only members of the population who were able to read or write. They were the professional keepers of understanding like biology and religion that we all have access to in the modern world.

It can be hard to picture what the world would be like today if the large majority of people were not able to read, but for the large majority of history the large 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 accessible. Obviously, it was still only really the richest and well-educated that could read or write, but 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 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 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 quickly gain access to the totality of human knowledge.