Books change the world
Last week I read a tweet that really got my goat, so much so that I stewed on it all weekend. The author, who is someone from the tech/startup community, said, to Tim O’Reilly no less:
“No-one ever changed the world by writing books.”
This pushed my rant button.
I thought about mentioning some books that have changed the face of civilization. Religious books: the Bible, which defines the shape of many Western civilizations, and the equivalent books of religious law in other cultures. Science books: Copernicus’ “On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres”, which began the scientific revolution, and defined a heliocentric model of the universe. Newton’s “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica”, which outlines classical mechanics and gravitation. Einstein’s multitude of publications. Books on economics: Keynes, anyone? Feminism: Friedan’s “Feminine Mystique”. Political thought. Philosophy. Need I go on?
On a micro- level, think about a book you read as a child, as a teenager, last year, last week, that changed the way you felt, gave you hope, gave you relaxation that you needed, or an escape from an unpleasant reality.
I could go on about world-changing books all day. Instead, I’m going to tell you a story about a very unexciting book. This book happens to be one that I wrote, on a subject that I’m passionate about. It’s a book on web development.
Now, this book is only a technical book. It won’t start any revolutions or cause any epiphanies, neither will it make you laugh or cry. My family won’t ever read it, and when non-technical people who are excited to discover I’m a published author hear the topic, their faces fall. It will never be on the New York Times list, or on Oprah, or be banned in countries with oppressive governments. It is a humble technical book.
This technical book has, however, sold quite well over the years. Many people have bought it (thank you), some have liked it, and some have reviewed it. Copies are in libraries, used as the prescribed texts in colleges, sold secondhand, and pirated as PDFs on the internet.
Hundreds of thousands of people have read this book, and, I hope, learned a little something about coding for the web.
Some of those people have probably gotten jobs as a result. Some might have graduated college. Some have built a personal website. Some might have gotten a promotion.
Out of those people, I venture that there have to be a hundred, perhaps more, perhaps less, who have started a company that does some kind of web development, whether it’s a consulting company or a startup. Maybe some of those companies got funded, maybe some were bootstrapped, maybe some were successful.
I wonder if that benchmark is something that the author of the tweet might value.
I hope it’s not too arrogant as an author to hope these things: that the books you write change someone’s life for the better, and in doing so change the world. I continue to believe this, and that is why I continue to write.