What if the world was void of books?

hello sir,it's not quite unimaginable for me to think a world without books.For my point,i can suggest that many of the books now ,are digitized and the time is not far when using kindle and such devices would be common in daily lives but still books gonna be there for years.There is already much discussion about electronic and manual mode of reading so i would nt touch that.As fa as knowledge is concerned,we have already read that in ancient era,the knowledge was being transfered in form of vocals to generations.As we needed something to preserve that knowledge,our ancestors came up with books (not the usual one ;ofcourse).They must have discovered something else to replace books as they(ancestors) required to preserve their preachings and knowledge...

If the world we live would not have books then we have no medium with which we can document our greatest achievenments and greatest blunders. Without books, there would be no biographies of great leaders and people who have in some way or another changed the world because of their beliefs, their achivements or even their greatest blunders. Without books, we would not have an alternate medium with which to keep mankinds greatest discoveries and not to mention the fact that people who have no access to the internet would not have a source of information with which to learn from. Withouth books, majority of the schools especially public schools would not have textbooks that can be used to teach children the different subjects in the curriculum not to mention the fact that there would be no authors would exist which have written works that had a profound impact in society and in some ways have shaped the world we live in for the past 50 years like Virginia Wolffe, J.K Rowling, Tom Clancy, Lewis Carrol and lets not forget that we would never have studies and appreciated the beautiful and sometimes deep poems that have touched our lives in one way or another thanks to poets like Confucius, Ralph Emerson, Dante Alighieri and a few others. Also without books medical journals would not exist, research papers are but a thing of the past, the histories of nations long recorded for thousands of years would be forgotten. The world will miss many things if books didn't exist and it would have hampered the progress of civilization for a thousand years or even more. Even now most of the schools on earth and even scientists who are experimenting on labs still rely on books and journals to get information, to promote research and to enable progress and advancement in fields such as particle physics, engineering, nanotechnology, biology and genetics. That's why books are still an integral part of the information age because for those who don't have or can't afford to have internet connections or their own computer they have a source of information in which to rely on so that they can learn more about the world we live in and as an added bonus you can access them anywhere.

We would probably have better memories. Before books and reading were widespread, people used to learn things via stories, poems and songs and it was all kept in their heads, they couldn't go and look things up. Books are still a fairly recent thing if you think about it. Certainly in Northern Europe books were not the thing until the coming of Christianity - even then reading and books were the preserve of a few and not for the use of the general population. There were plenty of sophisticated and successful cultures who did fine without books!

Hi Jack, The best thing would have been that every child would have enjoyed... there would have been no schools and all the information was to be passed to the next generation as stories... I would have loved that.... Then to add more, there would have been no competition and no need of extra work for that thing called "Money" Life would have been much simpler and easy going with no big dreams, aspirations.... But wait... I would not have been that happy as there would have been nothing to do after sunset! and I would have been a hunter! Cheers, theSids.