The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future

The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future by Joel J. Miller

Books have played an important role in the development of humanity. Knowledge has been able to be passed down down and accessed by greater numbers of people. There were challenges. Books were initially hand-copied. This required skill and limited the number of copies. It was also seen as a negatively impacting memory. Printing opened up more wide-spread reproduction of books. However, this also opened up significant cultural and religious conflicts. Printing rose in concert with the reformation and counter-refomration in the Christian world. Each side was keen to destroy books that they did not like, leading to the loss of many ancient texts. The Islamic world simply opposed printing, leading to a stagnation in intellectual capacity. (During the earlier era, the Islamic world had been the primary source of intellectual advancement.)

New forms of books later evolved. Don Quixote has been acknowledged as the first novel. Soon fiction branched to cover people from many diverse backgrounds. Today books have proliferated in paper and electronic formats. They are easy to produce and cover variety of different specialized topics.

This book seemed extremely appealing and interesting. I enjoyed the discussion, yet very little of it stuck out as memorable.