From Caves to Kindles
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Cave paintings are the oldest pictures. Some of them, like the beautiful images in the caves of Altamira in the north of Spain, are almost 30,000 years old. Many of these paintings show animals or hunting scenes. The images do not have written words, but when we look at them, we get an idea of the emotions the people felt when drawing them. The paintings tell stories of hopes and fears. They are an early form of communication.
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Sometime between 4000 and 3000 BCE, people in Egypt and Mesopotamia developed the skill of writing. They engraved text on stone tablets first. But it was impossible to carry stones from place to place. The invention of papyrus allowed documents to be moved easily. Writing on papyrus made it easier to correct mistakes, too. And do you know how they did that? When a scribe - the person who wrote the documents - made a mistake, they licked the ink off the papyrus before it got dry and made their corrections!
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People made the first books from papyrus and from thin animal skins. Paper was invented in China as early as 105 CE. The quality of paper soon became very good. The world's oldest known printed book is from China, too. It was published on May 11, 868 CE. In Europe, books were written manually until the middle of the 15th century, when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in Germany. Since that time, almost 140 million books have been published worldwide. For many people, one of life's greatest pleasures is spending a few hours in a bookshop browsing through the books.
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Books will be around for many years, of course. But there are many other ways of reading books and magazines, such as e-books and apps on mobile phones, which allow you to buy and download reading material to carry around with you and read whenever and wherever you want to.