Books and Beyond: The Importance of Story in the Digital Age

Abstract

With a readership that spans millennia and more than two billion adherents worldwide, the Bible has inarguably earned its right to the title, “The Greatest Story Ever Told.”¹ For centuries history’s most widely distributed book and treatises devoted to its study enjoyed a near monopoly within European scriptoria. In the West, this all changed in the fifteenth century with the advent of moveable type. Johannes Gutenberg may have chosen the Bible as his first major production, but his innovation ultimately spawned a new age, allowing for the Reformation, Renaissance, and Enlightenment, and, with them, modern science. Just as the print revolution allowed for nonreligious ideas and secular knowledge to flourish, so too is a new revolution taking place today that allows humanist ideas and scientific knowledge to reach every corner of the globe without filter or censorship—a digital revolution that will inevitably alter the course of history.²