Our capability to gain access to and read books has been absolutely crucial to our capability to understand the world around us.
It can be difficult to envision what the world would be like today if the large bulk of people were not able to read, but for the large bulk of history the vast majority 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 altered that, making books far more accessible. Obviously, it was still just really the richest and well-educated that could read or write, however it enabled a whole host of advancements in science, art, and thinking to be spread throughout great distances. Consider what would have taken place if the theory of gravity, or of evolution, could not have been distributed around the world. Human civilisation rests upon a structure of books, and we are fortunate to be able to simply 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 gain access to the totality of human understanding.
It's important to keep 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 most of humanity's literary history, we did not write much fiction at all. A lot of stories would have been sung throughout the great bulk of history, merely due to the fact that the huge majority of people could not read, implying that many books were specialised things meant for those few who might comprehend them. After a quick boom throughout the classical period of antiquity, the quantity of literate people dropped dramatically during the Middle Ages. Books became rare treasures, with monks painstakingly copying out the surviving traditional texts by hand so as to protect them, as they were some of the only members of the populace who could read or write. They were the expert keepers of understanding like biology and religious beliefs that all of us have access to in the modern-day world.
With such an abundant history of concepts, occasions, and stories right at our fingertips, it's often simple to forget how exceptionally fortunate 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 written (or the good ones at least). The best books of all time can easily change the way that you look at the world, which has actually held true throughout all of history too. The modern-day world is built on understanding 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 not been for the books that changed minds across the ages.