book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images,

typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper)

bound together and protected by a cover.[1] The technical term for this physical
arrangement is codex (plural, codices). In the history of hand-held physical
supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its
immediate predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf, and each
side of a leaf is a page.

As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great

length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and a still
considerable, though not so extensive, investment of time to read. This sense of
book has a restricted and an unrestricted sense. In the restricted sense, a book is
a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage that reflects
the fact that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls, and
each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. So, for instance, each
part of Aristotle's Physics is called a book. In the unrestricted sense, a book is
the compositional whole of which such sections, whether called books or chapters or
parts, are parts.

The intellectual content in a physical book need not be a composition, nor even be
called a book. Books can consist only of drawings, engravings, or photographs, or
such things as crossword puzzles or cut-out dolls. In a physical book, the pages
can be left blank or can feature an abstract set of lines as support for ongoing
entries, e.g., an account book, an appointment book, an autograph book, a notebook,
a diary, or a sketchbook. Some physical books are made with pages thick and sturdy
enough to support other physical objects, like a scrapbook or photograph album.
Books may be distributed in electronic form as e-books and other formats.

Although in ordinary academic parlance a monograph is understood to be a specialist

academic work, rather than a reference work on a single scholarly subject, in
library and information science monograph denotes more broadly any non-serial
publication complete in one volume (book) or a finite number of volumes (even a
novel like Proust's seven-volume In Search of Lost Time), in contrast to serial
publications like a magazine, journal, or newspaper. An avid reader or collector of
books is a bibliophile or colloquially, "bookworm". A shop where books are bought
and sold is a bookshop or bookstore. Books are also sold elsewhere. Books can also
be borrowed from libraries. Google has estimated that as of 2010, approximately
130,000,000 distinct titles had been published.[2] In some wealthier nations, the
sale of printed books has decreased because of the increased usage of e-books.[3]

Contents
1 Etymology
2 History
2.1 Antiquity
2.1.1 Tablet
2.1.2 Scroll
2.1.3 Codex
2.1.4 Manuscripts
2.1.5 Middle East
2.1.6 Wood block printing
2.1.7 Movable type and incunabula
2.2 19th century to 21st centuries
2.3 Indian manuscripts
2.4 Mesoamerican Codex
3 Modern manufacturing
3.1 Processes
3.1.1 Layout
3.1.2 Printing
3.1.3 Binding
3.2 Finishing
4 Digital printing
4.1 E-book
5 Design
6 Sizes
7 Types
7.1 By content
7.1.1 Fiction
7.1.2 Non-fiction
7.1.3 Other types
7.2 Decodable readers and leveled books
7.3 By physical format
8 Libraries
9 Identification and classification
9.1 Classification systems
10 Uses
11 Book marketing
11.1 Other forms of secondary spread
11.2 Evolution of the book industry
12 Paper and conservation
13 See also
14 Citations
15 General sources
16 Further reading
17 External links
Etymology
The word book comes from Old English boc, which in turn comes from the Germanic
root *bok-, cognate to 'beech'.[4] Similarly, in Slavic languages (for example,
Russian, Bulgarian, Macedonian) ????? (bukva�'letter') is cognate with 'beech'. In
Russian, Serbian and Macedonian, the word ??????? (bukvar') or ?????? (bukvar)
refers specifically to a primary school textbook that helps young children master
the techniques of reading and writing. It is thus conjectured that the earliest
Indo-European writings may have been carved on beech wood.[5] Similarly, the Latin
word codex, meaning a book in the modern sense (bound and with separate leaves),
originally meant 'block of wood'.

History
Main article: History of books

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Antiquity

Sumerian clay tablet, currently housed in the Oriental Institute at the University
of Chicago, inscribed with the text of the poem Inanna and Ebih by the priestess
Enheduanna, the first author whose name is known[6]
When writing systems were created in ancient civilizations, a variety of objects,
such as stone, clay, tree bark, metal sheets, and bones, were used for writing;
these are studied in epigraphy.

Tablet
Main articles: Clay tablet and Wax tablet
See also: Stylus
A tablet is a physically robust writing medium, suitable for casual transport and
writing. Clay tablets were flattened and mostly dry pieces of clay that could be
easily carried, and impressed with a stylus. They were used as a writing medium,
especially for writing in cuneiform, throughout the Bronze Age and well into the
Iron Age. Wax tablets were pieces of wood covered in a coating of wax thick enough
to record the impressions of a stylus. They were the normal writing material in
schools, in accounting, and for taking notes. They had the advantage of being
reusable: the wax could be melted, and reformed into a blank.

The custom of binding several wax tablets together (Roman pugillares) is a possible
precursor of modern bound (codex) books.[7] The etymology of the word codex (block
of wood) also suggests that it may have developed from wooden wax tablets.[8]

Scroll
Main article: Scroll

Book of the Dead of Hunefer; c. 1275 BC; ink and pigments on papyrus; 45 � 90.5 cm;
British Museum (London)
Scrolls can be made from papyrus, a thick paper-like material made by weaving the
stems of the papyrus plant, then pounding the woven sheet with a hammer-like tool
until it is flattened. Papyrus was used for writing in Ancient Egypt, perhaps as
early as the First Dynasty, although the first evidence is from the account books
of King Neferirkare Kakai of the Fifth Dynasty (about 2400 BC).[9] Papyrus sheets
were glued together to form a scroll. Tree bark such as lime and other materials
were also used.[10]

According to Herodotus (History 5:58), the Phoenicians brought writing and papyrus
to Greece around the 10th or 9th century BC. The Greek word for papyrus as writing
material (biblion) and book (biblos) come from the Phoenician port town Byblos,
through which papyrus was exported to Greece.[11] From Greek we also derive the
word tome (Greek: t?�??), which originally meant a slice or piece and from there
began to denote "a roll of papyrus". Tomus was used by the Latins with exactly the
same meaning as volumen (see also below the explanation by Isidore of Seville).

Whether made from papyrus, parchment, or paper, scrolls were the dominant form of
book in the Hellenistic, Roman, Chinese, Hebrew, and Macedonian cultures. The more
modern codex book format form took over the Roman world by late antiquity, but the
scroll format persisted much longer in Asia.

Codex

A Chinese bamboo book meets the modern definition of Codex

Main article: Codex
Isidore of Seville (d. 636) explained the then-current relation between codex, book
and scroll in his Etymologiae (VI.13): "A codex is composed of many books; a book
is of one scroll. It is called codex by way of metaphor from the trunks (codex) of
trees or vines, as if it were a wooden stock, because it contains in itself a
multitude of books, as it were of branches." Modern usage differs.

A codex (in modern usage) is the first information repository that modern people
would recognize as a "book": leaves of uniform size bound in some manner along one
edge, and typically held between two covers made of some more robust material. 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, where he praises its
compactness. However, the codex never gained much popularity in the pagan
Hellenistic world, and only within the Christian community did it gain widespread
use.[12] This change happened gradually during the 3rd and 4th centuries, and the
reasons for adopting the codex form of the book are several: the format is more
economical, as both sides of the writing material can be used; and it is portable,
searchable, and easy to conceal. A book is much easier to read, to find a page that
you want, and to flip through. A scroll is more awkward to use. The Christian
authors may also have wanted to distinguish their writings from the pagan and
Judaic texts written on scrolls. In addition, some metal books were made, that
required smaller pages of metal, instead of an impossibly long, unbending scroll of
metal. A book can also be easily stored in more compact places, or side by side in
a tight library or shelf space.

Manuscripts
Main article: Manuscript

Folio 14 recto of the 5th century Vergilius Romanus contains an author portrait of
Virgil. Note the bookcase (capsa), reading stand and the text written without word
spacing in rustic capitals.
The fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD saw the decline of the culture
of ancient Rome. Papyrus became difficult to obtain due to lack of contact with
Egypt, and parchment, which had been used for centuries, became the main writing
material. Parchment is a material made from processed animal skin and used�mainly
in the past�for writing on. Parchment is most commonly made of calfskin, sheepskin,
or goatskin. It was historically used for writing documents, notes, or the pages of
a book. Parchment is limed, scraped and dried under tension. It is not tanned, and
is thus different from leather. This makes it more suitable for writing on, but
leaves it very reactive to changes in relative humidity and makes it revert to
rawhide if overly wet.

Monasteries carried on the Latin writing tradition in the Western Roman Empire.
Cassiodorus, in the monastery of Vivarium (established around 540), stressed the
importance of copying texts.[13] St. Benedict of Nursia, in his Rule of Saint
Benedict (completed around the middle of the 6th century) later also promoted
reading.[14] The Rule of Saint Benedict (Ch. XLVIII), which set aside certain times
for reading, greatly influenced the monastic culture of the Middle Ages and is one
of the reasons why the clergy were the predominant readers of books. The tradition
and style of the Roman Empire still dominated, but slowly the peculiar medieval
book culture emerged.

The Codex Amiatinus anachronistically depicts the Biblical Ezra with the kind of
books used in the 8th Century AD.
Before the invention and adoption of the printing press, almost all books were
copied by hand, which made books expensive and comparatively rare. Smaller
monasteries usually had only a few dozen books, medium-sized perhaps a few hundred.
By the 9th century, larger collections held around 500 volumes and even at the end
of the Middle Ages, the papal library in Avignon and Paris library of the Sorbonne
held only around 2,000 volumes.[15]

The scriptorium of the monastery was usually located over the chapter house.
Artificial light was forbidden for fear it may damage the manuscripts. There were
five types of scribes:

Calligraphers, who dealt in fine book production

Copyists, who dealt with basic production and correspondence
Correctors, who collated and compared a finished book with the manuscript from
which it had been produced
Illuminators, who painted illustrations
Rubricators, who painted in the red letters

Burgundian author and scribe Jean Mi�lot, from his Miracles de Notre Dame, 15th
century.
The bookmaking process was long and laborious. The parchment had to be prepared,
then the unbound pages were planned and ruled with a blunt tool or lead, after
which the text was written by the scribe, who usually left blank areas for
illustration and rubrication. Finally, the book was bound by the bookbinder.[16]

Desk with chained books in the Malatestiana Library of Cesena, Italy.

Different types of ink were known in antiquity, usually prepared from soot and gum,
and later also from gall nuts and iron vitriol. This gave writing a brownish black
color, but black or brown were not the only colors used. There are texts written in
red or even gold, and different colors were used for illumination. For very
luxurious manuscripts the whole parchment was colored purple, and the text was
written on it with gold or silver (for example, Codex Argenteus).[17]

Irish monks introduced spacing between words in the 7th century. This facilitated
reading, as these monks tended to be less familiar with Latin. However, the use of
spaces between words did not become commonplace before the 12th century. It has
been argued that the use of spacing between words shows the transition from semi-
vocalized reading into silent reading.[18]

The first books used parchment or vellum (calfskin) for the pages. The book covers
were made of wood and covered with leather. Because dried parchment tends to assume
the form it had before processing, the books were fitted with clasps or straps.
During the later Middle Ages, when public libraries appeared, up to the 18th
century, books were often chained to a bookshelf or a desk to prevent theft. These
chained books are called libri catenati.

At first, books were copied mostly in monasteries, one at a time. With the rise of
universities in the 13th century, the Manuscript culture of the time led to an
increase in the demand for books, and a new system for copying books appeared. The
books were divided into unbound leaves (pecia), which were lent out to different
copyists, so the speed of book production was considerably increased. The system
was maintained by secular stationers guilds, which produced both religious and non-
religious material.[19]

Judaism has kept the art of the scribe alive up to the present. According to Jewish
tradition, the Torah scroll placed in a synagogue must be written by hand on
parchment and a printed book would not do, though the congregation may use printed
prayer books and printed copies of the Scriptures are used for study outside the
synagogue. A sofer "scribe" is a highly respected member of any observant Jewish
community.

Middle East
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People of various religious (Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Muslims) and ethnic
backgrounds (Syriac, Coptic, Persian, Arab etc.) in the Middle East also produced
and bound books in the Islamic Golden Age (mid 8th century to 1258), developing
advanced techniques in Islamic calligraphy, miniatures and bookbinding. A number of
cities in the medieval Islamic world had book production centers and book markets.
Yaqubi (d. 897) says that in his time Baghdad had over a hundred booksellers.[20]
Book shops were often situated around the town's principal mosque[21] as in
Marrakesh, Morocco, that has a street named Kutubiyyin or book sellers in English
and the famous Koutoubia Mosque is named so because of its location in this street.

The medieval Muslim world also used a method of reproducing reliable copies of a
book in large quantities known as check reading, in contrast to the traditional
method of a single scribe producing only a single copy of a single manuscript. In
the check reading method, only "authors could authorize copies, and this was done
in public sessions in which the copyist read the copy aloud in the presence of the
author, who then certified it as accurate."[22] With this check-reading system, "an
author might produce a dozen or more copies from a single reading," and with two or
more readings, "more than one hundred copies of a single book could easily be
produced."[23] By using as writing material the relatively cheap paper instead of
parchment or papyrus the Muslims, in the words of Pedersen "accomplished a feat of
crucial significance not only to the history of the Islamic book, but also to the
whole world of books".[24]

Wood block printing

Bagh print, a traditional woodblock printing in Bagh Madhya Pradesh, India.

In woodblock printing, a relief image of an entire page was carved into blocks of
wood, inked, and used to print copies of that page. This method originated in
China, in the Han dynasty (before 220 AD), as a method of printing on textiles and
later paper, and was widely used throughout East Asia. The oldest dated book
printed by this method is The Diamond Sutra (868 AD). The method (called woodcut
when used in art) arrived in Europe in the early 14th century. Books (known as
block-books), as well as playing-cards and religious pictures, began to be produced
by this method. Creating an entire book was a painstaking process, requiring a
hand-carved block for each page; and the wood blocks tended to crack, if stored for
long. The monks or people who wrote them were paid highly.

Movable type and incunabula

A 15th-century Incunable. Notice the blind-tooled cover, corner bosses and clasps.
Main articles: Movable type and Incunable

Selected Teachings of Buddhist Sages and Son Masters, the earliest known book
printed with movable metal type, printed in Korea, in 1377, Biblioth�que nationale
de France.
The Chinese inventor Bi Sheng made movable type of earthenware c. 1045, but there
are no known surviving examples of his printing. Around 1450, in what is commonly
regarded as an independent invention, Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type in
Europe, along with innovations in casting the type based on a matrix and hand
mould. This invention gradually made books less expensive to produce, and more
widely available.

Early printed books, single sheets and images which were created before 1501 in
Europe are known as incunables or incunabula. "A man born in 1453, the year of the
fall of Constantinople, could look back from his fiftieth year on a lifetime in
which about eight million books had been printed, more perhaps than all the scribes
of Europe had produced since Constantine founded his city in AD 330."[25]

19th century to 21st centuries

Steam-powered printing presses became popular in the early 19th century. These
machines could print 1,100 sheets per hour, but workers could only set 2,000
letters per hour.[citation needed] Monotype and linotype typesetting machines were
introduced in the late 19th century. They could set more than 6,000 letters per
hour and an entire line of type at once. There have been numerous improvements in
the printing press. As well, the conditions for freedom of the press have been
improved through the gradual relaxation of restrictive censorship laws. See also
intellectual property, public domain, copyright. In mid-20th century, European book
production had risen to over 200,000 titles per year.

Throughout the 20th century, libraries have faced an ever-increasing rate of

publishing, sometimes called an information explosion. The advent of electronic
publishing and the internet means that much new information is not printed in paper
books, but is made available online through a digital library, on CD-ROM, in the
form of e-books or other online media. An on-line book is an e-book that is
available online through the internet. Though many books are produced digitally,
most digital versions are not available to the public, and there is no decline in
the rate of paper publishing.[26] There is an effort, however, to convert books
that are in the public domain into a digital medium for unlimited redistribution
and infinite availability. This effort is spearheaded by Project Gutenberg combined
with Distributed Proofreaders. There have also been new developments in the process
of publishing books. Technologies such as POD or "print on demand", which make it
possible to print as few as one book at a time, have made self-publishing (and
vanity publishing) much easier and more affordable. On-demand publishing has
allowed publishers, by avoiding the high costs of warehousing, to keep low-selling
books in print rather than declaring them out of print.

Indian manuscripts
See also: Palm-leaf manuscript
Goddess Saraswati image dated 132 AD excavated from Kankali tila depicts her
holding a manuscript in her left hand represented as a bound and tied palm leaf or
birch bark manuscript. In India a bounded manuscript made of birch bark or palm
leaf existed side by side since antiquity. [27] The text in palm leaf manuscripts
was inscribed with a knife pen on rectangular cut and cured palm leaf sheets;
colourings were then applied to the surface and wiped off, leaving the ink in the
incised grooves. Each sheet typically had a hole through which a string could pass,
and with these the sheets were tied together with a string to bind like a book.

Mesoamerican Codex
The codices of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica (Mexico and Central America) had the same
form as the European codex, but were instead made with long folded strips of either
fig bark (amatl) or plant fibers, often with a layer of whitewash applied before
writing. New World codices were written as late as the 16th century (see Maya
codices and Aztec codices). Those written before the Spanish conquests seem all to
have been single long sheets folded concertina-style, sometimes written on both
sides of the local amatl paper.

Modern manufacturing
Main article: Bookbinding
See also: Publishing

The spine of the book is an important aspect in book design, especially in the
cover design. When the books are stacked up or stored in a shelf, the details on
the spine is the only visible surface that contains the information about the book.
In stores, it is the details on the spine that attract a buyer's attention first.
The methods used for the printing and binding of books continued fundamentally
unchanged from the 15th century into the early 20th century. While there was more
mechanization, a book printer in 1900 had much in common with Gutenberg.
Gutenberg's invention was the use of movable metal types, assembled into words,
lines, and pages and then printed by letterpress to create multiple copies. Modern
paper books are printed on papers designed specifically for printed books.
Traditionally, book papers are off-white or low-white papers (easier to read), are
opaque to minimise the show-through of text from one side of the page to the other
and are (usually) made to tighter caliper or thickness specifications, particularly
for case-bound books. Different paper qualities are used depending on the type of
book: Machine finished coated papers, woodfree uncoated papers, coated fine papers
and special fine papers are common paper grades.

Today, the majority of books are printed by offset lithography.[28] When a book is
printed, the pages are laid out on the plate so that after the printed sheet is
folded the pages will be in the correct sequence. Books tend to be manufactured
nowadays in a few standard sizes. The sizes of books are usually specified as "trim
size": the size of the page after the sheet has been folded and trimmed. The
standard sizes result from sheet sizes (therefore machine sizes) which became
popular 200 or 300 years ago, and have come to dominate the industry. British
conventions in this regard prevail throughout the English-speaking world, except
for the USA. The European book manufacturing industry works to a completely
different set of standards.

Processes
Layout

Parts of a modern case bound book

Modern bound books are organized according to a particular format called the book's
layout. Although there is great variation in layout, modern books tend to adhere to
as set of rules with regard to what the parts of the layout are and what their
content usually includes. A basic layout will include a front cover, a back cover
and the book's content which is called its body copy or content pages. The front
cover often bears the book's title (and subtitle, if any) and the name of its
author or editor(s). The inside front cover page is usually left blank in both
hardcover and paperback books. The next section, if present, is the book's front
matter, which includes all textual material after the front cover but not part of
the book's content such as a foreword, a dedication, a table of contents and
publisher data such as the book's edition or printing number and place of
publication. Between the body copy and the back cover goes the end matter which
would include any indices, sets of tables, diagrams, glossaries or lists of cited
works (though an edited book with several authors usually places cited works at the
end of each authored chapter). The inside back cover page, like that inside the
front cover, is usually blank. The back cover is the usual place for the book's
ISBN and maybe a photograph of the author(s)/ editor(s), perhaps with a short
introduction to them. Also here often appear plot summaries, barcodes and excerpted
reviews of the book.[29]

Printing

Book covers
Some books, particularly those with shorter runs (i.e. fewer copies) will be
printed on sheet-fed offset presses, but most books are now printed on web presses,
which are fed by a continuous roll of paper, and can consequently print more copies
in a shorter time. As the production line circulates, a complete "book" is
collected together in one stack, next to another, and another web press carries out
the folding itself, delivering bundles of signatures (sections) ready to go into
the gathering line. Note that the pages of a book are printed two at a time, not as
one complete book. Excess numbers are printed to make up for any spoilage due to
make-readies or test pages to assure final print quality.

A make-ready is the preparatory work carried out by the pressmen to get the
printing press up to the required quality of impression. Included in make-ready is
the time taken to mount the plate onto the machine, clean up any mess from the
previous job, and get the press up to speed. As soon as the pressman decides that
the printing is correct, all the make-ready sheets will be discarded, and the press
will start making books. Similar make readies take place i