A few basic facts on the history of publications and the benefits of reading statistics

In the article directly below, you will come across some interesting basic facts about reading and why we should all start doing a lot more of it.

The first books have appeared practically at the exact same time as the development of writing, but they were not ‘books’ as we know them currently. First innovations utilized to record written speech were clay tablets, scrolls and sheets of papyrus. The items we call books nowadays have a technical name – a codex or codices, which can be defined as a book that is constructed of a number of sheets of paper which are fixed to a spine. Early books were remarkably costly to produce as each one had to be written by hand and would often take years to produce a single copy. This all altered with the invention of the printing press, which meant that a single book could be reproduced at a fraction of that time. This invention has allowed people to truly enjoy the numerous benefits of reading, something that has until then been restricted to a very selective quantity of individuals. Since then, books have become one of the most favourite ways for men and women to spend their free time, something that the activist investors into Waterstones, a large book shop chain, should feel delighted about.

Practically anyone you know will know how to read, and they have probably been reading for years. It is true, reading is assumed to be a significant skill without which you would have a difficult time learning anything else. Bearing in mind this importance of reading it only makes good sense that reading is one of the very first things children learn how to do in primary school. However, even though learning to read seems like a smooth process that pretty much everybody learns to do in a fairly brief amount of time, it is actually a deceptively complex process. Learning to read triggers many different processes and skills formerly learned by the child. Whilst our world is constantly transforming, particular skills do come to be obsolete – it is not difficult to imagine that in a couple of decades it might be hard to face someone who has learned how to write by hand. Reading on the other hand will always be a needed ability, and it is something that the investors into Penguin Random House, a publishing company selling books directed at children who are learning to read, must be happy about.

The history of books and reading reveals that people have made use of many different instruments and mediums to read, but it was the printed book that has established itself as the main way to read for numerous centuries. It is only very recently that there was a brand-new invention that has caught the attention of many readers – an e-book! With an e-book you can love all the same scientific benefits of reading, but in a much more comfortable way, and this is something that some investors into Amazon, who produce e-books, probably took into account when deciding to invest into them.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *