A book is a written work of substantial length created by one or more authors. The work is typically printed on many sheets of paper as pages bound together into a bookblock, then glued to the middle of a foldable cover that protects the pages. Before the wide adoption of the modern printing press, codices were used to create handwritten manuscripts. Older writing media include scrolls and clay tablets. Nowadays, books can be distributed in other forms like audiobooks, and electronic books (ebooks). Books are broadly classified into fiction, which contains invented or imaginary narratives; and non-fiction, which contains content intended as factual truth.
The book publishing process is the series of steps involved in its creation and dissemination, often undertaken in modern times by a commercial publishing company. The publishing industry has recently seen major changes due to new technologies, including ebooks and audiobooks (recordings of books read aloud). Awareness of the needs of people with print disabilities has led to a rise in accessible publishing formats such as braille printing and large-print editions. Google Books estimated in 2010 that roughly 130 million total unique books have been published.
Books are sold at general retail stores and specialized bookstores, as well as online, and can be borrowed from libraries or public bookcases. The reception of books has led to several social consequences, including censorship.
Books are sometimes contrasted with periodical literature, such as newspapers or magazines, for which new editions are published according to a regular schedule. Some objects broadly described as "books" are left empty for personal use, such as notebooks, diaries, sketchbooks, account books, and autograph books.
Etymology The word book comes from the Old English , which is similar to Old Norse and Old Saxon . These may all come from hypothesized Germanic , thought to mean "beech". In Slavic languages like Russian, Bulgarian, and Macedonian ()—"letter"—is cognate with "beech". The Russian word (), and the Serbian () refer to a primary school textbook that helps young children master reading and writing. It is thus conjectured that the earliest Indo-European writings may have been carved on beech wood. The Latin word , describing the format used by a modern book, bound and with separate leaves, originally meant "block of wood".
Definitions
A book is traditionally composed of many pages bound together along one edge and protected by a cover, but technological advances have expanded the meaning of the term substantially over time with the evolution of communication media. Book and publishing historian Zoran Velagić wrote that for the book, "consensus does not exist 'even at the level of a basic definition'".
One definition was given by UNESCO in 1964 for recording national statistics on book production: a book is "a non-periodical printed publication of at least 49 pages, exclusive of the cover pages, published in the country and made available to the public". This distinguished books from other written material such as pamphlets. Kovač et al. critiqued the UNESCO definition for not accounting for new formats. They proposed four criteria (length, textual content, a defined form, and "information architecture [such as] linear structure and key textual elements") that different types of books meet to different degrees. In their "hierarchy of the book", formats that fulfill more criteria are more similar to the traditional printed book.
Historian James Raven suggested that when studying how books have been used to communicate, they should be defined in a broadly inclusive way as "portable, durable, replicable and legible" means of recording and disseminating information, rather than relying on physical or contextual features. This would include, for example, ebooks, newspapers, and quipus (a form of knot-based recording historically used by cultures in Andean South America), but not objects fixed in place such as inscribed monuments.
History
The modern book is the product of a long history of gradual development punctuated by several major disruptive innovations. Librarian Fred Kilgour identified the most significant technological changes to the book as: clay tablets, papyrus scrolls, the codex, printing, steam power, offset printing, and electronic books. Many cultures have independently developed pictographic symbols that represent physical things, concepts, and words but lack the capacity to transcribe a spoken language. These systems, often called proto-writing, typically have a narrower or specialized function than a full writing system.
In at least three cases, proto-writing was independently developed into writing systems that can be used to transcribe spoken language: Sumerian cuneiform in Mesopotamia, written Chinese, and the Maya script in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. For example, the Jiahu symbols found inscribed on bones and tortoise shells in 8,600-year-old Chinese graves are believed by archaeologists to be precursors to the Chinese writing system that only fully emerged thousands of years later. Various forms of pictographs, described by art historian Elizabeth Hill Boone as "non-writing and beyond writing", developed alongside linguistic writing and continue to be used in modern texts, including maps, diagrams, logical notation, mathematical notation, musical notation, and chemistry's structural formulas. Some of the oldest surviving written records were made on clay tablets.
Tablet
The earliest surviving texts widely accepted as writing are cuneiform tablets. They emerged from earlier traditions of sealed clay envelopes called bullae, which contained physical tokens, and logographic proto-cuneiform written to represent the physical tokens. Created circa 3200 BC during the Uruk period in modern-day Iraq, the tablets were made from flattened pieces of clay that scribes impressed with a stylus. The clay tablets were used in the Ancient Near East for thousands of years throughout the Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age. Clay tablets are very durable compared to other early writing materials and many survive to the present day. Stored in libraries and private residences, they were used in many of the ways that modern writing is used, including to record literature. The Standard Babylonian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest surviving works of literature, was written on a series of about 12 tablets each with over 300 lines of cuneiform verse, as a standardized edition of earlier stories copied and compiled by centuries of scribes. Depending on the definition of "book", the tablets are considered either a very early form of the book or a precursor to true books.
Scroll
In Ancient Egypt, a formal writing system known as hieroglyphs developed in parallel to Mesopotamian cuneiform. Ancient Egyptian scribes wrote hieroglyphic texts on papyrus rolled into scrolls, with the oldest surviving (unused) roll of papyrus found preserved in the 2900 BC tomb of Hemaka. The scribes wrote in contrasting black and red ink, with the red used to highlight elements like titles, section headings, and authorship. This practice, called rubrication, was used for millennia in manuscript book production. Early scroll books, like The Maxims of Ptahhotep written circa 2400 BC, were philosophical books in the Egyptian sebayt or "teaching" genre.
Hebrew, Greek, and Roman scribes adopted the format, often with a central handle around which the papyrus was rolled. Parchment was not frequently used in scrolls as it increased a manuscript's weight. The codex dominated in the Roman world by Late Antiquity, but scrolls persisted into the early era of printed books in Asia.
Codex
The codex is the ancestor of the modern book. It introduced the format where sheets of uniform size were bound along one edge, and typically held between two covers made of some more robust material. Unlike modern books, the early codices were hand-written manuscripts, and the pages were not made from paper, but typically parchment or vellum, derived from animal hides. The first written mention of the codex as a form of book is from Martial, in his Apophoreta CLXXXIV at the end of the first century AD, where he praises its compactness. The codex format was possibly developed from the Roman custom of binding wax tablets (wooden boards containing wax for writing temporary notes with a stylus) together.
The codex format gradually displaced the scroll. The vast majority of surviving Christian texts from before the 5th century AD (158 of 172 documents as of 2002) are codices. Pagan authors were slower to transition, but nearly all Greek texts were being composed as codices rather than scrolls by the end of the 4th century AD. In Islam, many of the earliest manuscript copies of the Quran were composed as codices. Jewish authors were slower to adopt the new format—the oldest surviving Jewish codices date to the 10th century AD—resulting in the scroll becoming a visual shorthand for Jewish culture. To the present day, Torah scrolls are still read aloud in synagogues during Jewish prayers.
Scribes independently developed a similar codex format in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. They wrote manuscripts onto long folded strips of either fig bark (amatl) or plant fibers and bound them between wooden planks, although only a few have survived. Pictographic writing was widespread, and the Maya developed a phonetic syllabary. The oldest of the surviving Maya codices dates to the 11th century AD. Most of the pre-Columbian Aztec codices were destroyed by the Spanish, but a few, such as the Codex Borbonicus, date to around the time of European arrival.
Manuscript
Manuscripts, handwritten and hand-copied documents, were the dominant form of writing before the invention and widespread adoption of print. Before the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, each text was a unique, handcrafted, valuable article, personalized through the design features incorporated by the scribe, owner, bookbinder, and illustrator.
In the early Western Roman Empire, monasteries continued Latin writing traditions, and the clergy were the predominant readers and copyists. The bookmaking process was long and laborious. Before a scribe could copy the text, the pages had to be prepared, planned, and ruled, with spaces left for illustration and rubrication, after which the pages still had to be bound. Manuscript books were expensive and rare. Even at the end of the Middle Ages, the large Paris library of the Sorbonne held only around 2,000 volumes. The rise of universities in the 13th century led to an increased demand for books, and a faster system appeared in which unbound leaves, called pecia, were lent to different copyists.
In South, Southeast, and Central Asia, bound palm leaf manuscripts have existed for thousands of years. In the 5th century BC, Indian scribes began to use the technique to record what had previously been oral history. Palm leaf manuscripts then spread to neighboring areas, including modern-day Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Tibet. Text was etched into the leaves with a sharp metal stylus. These faint markings would then be brushed with ink, or the whole surface of the leaves would be coated with a mixture of oil and either lamp black or powdered coal. The smooth surface of the leaves could be wiped clean with muslin, leaving the coloring in the incised grooves. Each sheet typically had a hole through which a string could pass, binding the sheets to each other and to hard wooden covers. The bundles were often stored wrapped in cotton cloth to protect them from insects, dust, and dirt. These manuscripts were copied until the widespread usage of paper in the 19th century. Recently, scholars and museums have used a variety of methods to digitally copy surviving manuscripts and physically preserve them.