Virtually everything you want to know is now available to you.

I’ll repeat: almost everything you need or want to know in historical or scientific matters is out there waiting for you, online or in books. (Wisdom – that being the wise application of information to our lives and societies and destinies – well, that’s a bit harder to obtain).

We have no idea of the change that’s happened in my lifetime. As late as, say, 1995, getting information was very difficult unless it was something that was a publicly discussed matter. Information you needed might be in an obscure library source, but that might have involved travel. If the particular source was not fragile, you might have been able to get a helpful librarian to make photocopies and mail them to you. But that involved your knowing what library your information was in, and where it was housed in that institution.

Going back in time, the situation becomes even more complex. What we think of as a photocopy machine wasn’t available commercially until 1959, and even then only became widespread around 1970. Before that, getting a copy of a book no longer commercially available often involved traveling to the place that had it, and physically copying it out.

Gutenberg invented moveable type around 1440, and books dramatically dropped in price following that but they were still far too expensive for most individuals. Prior to the printing press invention, it’s estimated that an average book cost about 3 months of an average laborer’s time to buy. In other words, if you make, say, $3,000 a month, a book in 1400 would have cost you the equivalent of $9,000.

(One of the reasons for the development of what we know as universities was due to books. If a young man wanted to do academic work in 1300, he would travel to Bologna or Paris or London to learn. Of course, there were professors there, but one of the treasures of these institutions was that the were books there. Those books, insanely valuable, never left the rooms they were stored in, and if valuable enough, might be chained to prevent theft).

You are living in interesting times. If you search hard enough, and know how to search, almost everything you might want to learn is available online. If in book format, it’s probably digitized, and most books are available in some form in print. If you are in any type of information career, learning how to search is one of the most valuable skills you can have.