The world today is built on an almost incomprehensible amount of understanding that has 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 quickly change the way that you look at the world, which has actually held true throughout all of history too. The modern 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 actually not been for the books that changed minds throughout the ages.

It's important to keep in mind 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 mankind's literary history, we did not compose much fiction at all. Most stories would have been sung throughout the great majority of history, simply since the large bulk of individuals might not read, indicating that the majority of books were specialised things meant for those few who might comprehend them. After a quick boom throughout the classical era of antiquity, the amount of literate individuals dropped dramatically during the Middle Ages. Books became rare 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 specialist keepers of knowledge like biology and religion that we all have access to in the modern world.

It can be hard to imagine what the world would resemble today if the huge bulk of individuals were unable to read, but for the huge bulk of history the large majority of people could not, and nor were books accessible even if they could. It was the invention of the printing press towards the close of the 15th that changed that, making books much 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 developments in science, art, and thinking to be spread out throughout great distances. Consider what would have occurred 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 fortunate 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 easily access the totality of human understanding.