Never ever before have actually books been so accessible as they are today in the contemporary world; keep reading to learn more.
It can be hard to envision what the world would resemble today if the vast bulk of people were not able to read, but for the large majority of history the huge majority of people might not, and nor were books accessible even if they could. It was the development of the printing press towards the close of the 15th that changed that, making books much more available. Of course, it was still just truly the richest and well-read that could read or write, but it made it possible for a whole host of developments 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 structure of books, and we are lucky to be able to merely 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.
With such a rich history of concepts, events, and stories right at our fingertips, it's often easy to forget how incredibly 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 substantial proportion of all the books that have actually 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 held true throughout all of history as well. The contemporary world is built upon knowledge that has actually been passed 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 not been for the books that changed minds throughout the ages.
It's important to keep in mind that, although a lot of the best modern books of all time tend to be regarded as ground-breaking works of fiction, for the majority of humanity's literary history, we did not write much fiction at all. The majority of stories would have been sung throughout the great majority of history, just because the large bulk of people could not read, suggesting that most books were specialised things meant for those few who might comprehend them. After a brief boom throughout the classical period of antiquity, the amount of literate individuals dropped considerably during the Middle Ages. Books became uncommon treasures, with monks painstakingly copying out the surviving timeless texts by hand so as to maintain them, as they were some of the only members of the population who were able to read or write. They were the specialist keepers of knowledge like biology and faith that all of us have access to in the modern world.