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A book is a structured presentation of recorded information, primarily in verbal and graphical forms, existing in physical, electronic, and audiobook formats. It can be classified into fiction and non-fiction, and the modern book industry has evolved with technology to include accessible formats for print-disabled individuals. The definition of a book has changed over time, with various criteria proposed for distinguishing it from other written materials.

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10 views

Book

A book is a structured presentation of recorded information, primarily in verbal and graphical forms, existing in physical, electronic, and audiobook formats. It can be classified into fiction and non-fiction, and the modern book industry has evolved with technology to include accessible formats for print-disabled individuals. The definition of a book has changed over time, with various criteria proposed for distinguishing it from other written materials.

Uploaded by

Mosarraf Hossain
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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A book is a structured presentation of recorded information, primarily verbal and

graphical, through a medium. Originally physical, electronic books and audiobooks are
now existent. Physical books are objects that contain printed material, mostly of writing
and images. Modern books are typically composed of many pages bound together and
protected by a cover, what is known as the codex format; older formats include
the scroll and the tablet.

As a conceptual object, a book often refers to a written work of substantial length by one
or more authors, which may also be distributed digitally as an electronic book (ebook).
These kinds of works can be broadly classified into fiction (containing invented content,
often narratives) and non-fiction (containing content intended as factual truth). But a
physical book may not contain a written work: for example, it may
contain only drawings, engravings, photographs, sheet music, puzzles, or removable
content like paper dolls.

The modern book industry has seen several major changes due to new technologies,
including ebooks and audiobooks (recordings of books being read aloud). Awareness of
the needs of print-disabled people has led to a rise in formats designed for greater
accessibility such as braille printing and large-print editions.

Google Books estimated in 2010 that approximately 130 million total unique books had
been published. The book publishing process is the series of steps involved in book
creation and dissemination. Books are sold at both regular stores and specialized
bookstores, as well as online (for delivery), and can be borrowed from libraries or public
bookcases. The reception of books has led to a number of social consequences,
including censorship.

Books are sometimes contrasted with periodical literature, such as newspapers or


magazines, where new editions are published according to a regular schedule. Related
items, also broadly categorized as "books", are left empty for personal use: as in the
case of account books, appointment books, autograph
books, notebooks, diaries and sketchbooks.

Etymology
The word book comes from the Old English bōc, which in turn likely comes from
the Germanic root *bōk-, cognate to "beech".[1] In Slavic
languages like Russian, Bulgarian, Macedonian буква bukva—"letter" is cognate with
"beech". In Russian, Serbian and Macedonian, the word букварь (bukvar')
or буквар (bukvar) refers 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.[2] The Latin word codex,
meaning a book in the modern sense (bound and with separate leaves), originally
meant "block of wood".[3]

An avid reader or collector of books is a bibliophile, or colloquially a "bookworm".[4]


Definitions
In its modern incarnation, a book is typically composed of many pages (commonly
of paper, parchment, or vellum) that are bound together along one edge and protected
by a cover. By extension, book refers to a physical book's written, printed, or graphic
contents.[5] A single part or division of a longer written work may also be called a book,
especially for some works composed in antiquity: each part of Aristotle's Physics, for
example, is a book.[6]

It is difficult to create a precise definition of the book that clearly delineates it from other
kinds of written material across time and culture. The meaning of the term has changed
substantially over time with the evolution of communication media.[7] Historian of
books James Raven has 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.[8][9]

A stricter definition is given by UNESCO: for the purpose of recording national statistics
on book production, it recommended that a book be defined as "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", distinguishing them from other written material such
as pamphlets.[5][10] Kovač et al. have critiqued this definition for failing to account for new
digital formats. They propose four criteria (a minimum length; textual content; a form
with defined boundaries; and "information architecture" like linear structure and certain
textual elements) that form a "hierarchy of the book", in which formats that fulfill more
criteria are considered more similar to the traditional printed book.[11][12]

Although in academic language a monograph is a specialist work on a single subject,


in library and information science the term is used more broadly to mean any non-serial
publication complete in one volume (a physical book) or a definite number of volumes
(such as a multi-volume novel), in contrast to serial or periodical publications.

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