Books, and the quantity of people who could read them, have actually been definitely essential to human advancement over the centuries.
With such an abundant 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 substantial percentage of all the books that have actually ever been written (or the good ones at least). The best books of all time can quickly alter the manner in which you look at the world, and that has actually held true throughout all of history also. The contemporary world is built upon understanding that has actually been handed 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 not been for the books that changed minds across the ages.
It can be tough to picture what the world would be like today if the vast bulk of individuals were unable to read, but for the large majority of history the vast bulk of individuals might 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 much more available. Obviously, it was still only really the wealthiest and well-educated that could read or write, but it made it possible for an entire host of advancements in science, art, and thinking to be spread throughout great distances. Consider what would have occurred if the theory of gravity, or of evolution, could not have been dispersed across the globe. Human civilisation rests upon a foundation of books, and we are fortunate to be able to just log onto a website like the one backed by the co-founder of the impact investor with a stake in World of Books, and quickly access the totality of human understanding.
It is very important to keep in mind that, although plenty of the best modern books of all time tend to be considered as ground-breaking works of fiction, for most of mankind's literary history, we did not compose much fiction at all. Most stories would have been sung throughout the great bulk of history, just because the large majority of individuals could not read, meaning that the majority of books were specialised things meant for those few who could comprehend them. After a short boom during the classical period of antiquity, the amount of literate people dropped significantly throughout the Middle Ages. Books ended up being rare treasures, with monks meticulously copying out the surviving 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 expert keepers of knowledge like biology and religious beliefs that we all have access to in the modern-day world.