| A book is a collection of leaves of paper, parchment or other material, bound together along one edge within covers. A book is also a literary work or a
main division of such a work. A book produced in electronic format is known as an e-book.
In library and information
science, a book is called a monograph to distinguish it from serial publications such as magazines,
journals or newspapers.
A lover of books is usually referred to as a bibliophile, a bibliophilist, or a philobiblist.
History
The oral account (word of mouth, tradition, hearsay) is the oldest carrier of messages and stories.
When writing systems were invented in ancient civilizations, clay tablets or parchment scrolls were used as, for example, in the library of Alexandria.
Scrolls were later phased out in favor of the codex, a bound book with pages and a spine, the form of
most books today. The codex was invented in the first few centuries A.D. (or earlier? Some have said that Julius Caesar invented the first codex during the Gallic Wars. He would issue scrolls folded up accordion style and use the "pages" as reference
points).
Before the invention and adoption of the printing press, almost all
books were copied by hand, which made books comparatively expensive and rare. During the early middle ages, when only churches, universities, and rich noblemen could typically afford books, they were often
chained to a bookshelf or a desk to prevent theft. The first books used parchment or vellum (calf
skin) for the pages, which was later replaced with paper.
In the mid 15th century books began to be produced by block printing in western Europe (the technique had been known in the
East centuries earlier). In block printing, a relief image of an entire page was carved out of wood. It could then be inked and
used to reproduce many copies of that page. Creating an entire book, however, was a painstaking process, requiring a hand-carved
block for each page. The oldest dated book printed by this method is The Diamond Sutra.
The Chinese inventor Pi Sheng made
moveable type of earthenware circa 1045, but we have no surviving examples of his printing.
He embedded the characters, face up, in a shallow tray lined with warm wax. He laid a board
across them and pressed it down until all the characters were at exactly the same level. When the wax cooled he used his letter
tray to print whole pages.
It was not until Johann Gutenberg popularized the printing press with metal moveable type in the 15th century that books started to be affordable and widely available. This upset the
status quo, leading to remarks such as "The printing press will allow books to get into the hands of people who have no business
reading books" (need source for quote).
The following centuries were spent on improving both the printing press and the conditions for freedom of the press through the gradual relaxation of restrictive
laws. See also intellectual property, public domain, copyright, need
expansion; early books were usually freely copied.
Conservation issues
In the mid-19th century, paper made from pulp (cellulose, wood) was introduced because it was cheaper than cloth-based paper (term?). Pulp based paper made
cheap novels, cheap school text books and cheap books of all kinds available to the general public. This paved the way for huge
leaps in the rate of literacy in industrialised nations and eased the spread of information during the Second Industrial Revolution.
However, this pulp paper contained acid that causes a sort of slow fires
that eventually destroys the paper from within. Earlier techniques for making paper used limestone rollers which neutralized the
acid in the pulp. Libraries today have to consider mass
deacidification of their older collections. Books printed 1850–1950 are at risk; more recent books are often printed on
acid-free or alkaline paper.
The proper care of books takes into account the possibility of chemical changes to the cover and text. Books are best stored
in reduced lighting, definitely out of direct sunlight, at cool temperatures, and at moderate humidity. Books, especially heavy
ones, need the support of surrounding volumes to maintain their shape. It is desirable for that reason to group books by
size.
Collections of books
Maintaining a library used to be the privilege of princes, the wealthy,
monasteries and other religious institutions, and universities. The growth of a
public library system in the United States started in the late 19th century and was much helped by donations from Andrew Carnegie. This reflected classes in a society: The poor or the middle class had to share most
books through a public library or by other means while the rich could afford to have a private library built into their
mansion.
The advent of paperback books in the 20th century led to an explosion of popular publishing. Paperback books made owning books affordable for many
people. Paperback books often included works from genres that had previously been published mostly in pulp magazines. As a result of the low cost of such books and the spread of
bookstores filled with them (in addition to the creation of a smaller market of extremely cheap used paperbacks) owning a private
library ceased to be a status symbol for the rich.
While a small collection of books, or one to be used by a small number of people, can be stored in any way convenient to the
owners, a large or public collection requires a catalogue and some means of
consulting it. Often codes or other marks have to be added to the books to speed the process of relating them to the catalogue
and their correct shelf position. Where these identify a volume uniquely, they are referred to as "call numbers".
In library and booksellers' catalogues, it is common to include an abbreviation such as "Crown 8vo" to indicate the paper size from which the book is made.
When rows of books are lined on a bookshelf, bookends are sometimes needed to keep
them from slanting.
Keeping track of books
All books of the world are said to constitute the Gutenberg
Galaxy, or, to use a term coined by eBook author Rick Sutcliffe in
the early 1980s, the Metalibrary (see [1] (http://www.metalibrary.ca/)).
For the entire 20th century most librarians concerned with offering proper
library services to the public (or a smaller subset such as students) worried about keeping track of the books being added yearly
to the Gutenberg Galaxy. Through a global society called the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) they devised a
series of tools such as the International Standard Book Description or ISBD.
Besides, each book is specified by a International Standard Book Number, or ISBN, which
is unique to every book produced by participating publishers, world wide. It is managed by the ISBN Society. It has four parts.
The first part is the country code, the second the publisher code, and the third
the title code. The last part is a checksum or a check digit and can take values from 0-9 and X. The EAN Barcodes numbers for books are derived from the ISBN by prefixing 978,
for Bookland and calculating a new check digit.
Many government publishers, in industrial countries as well as in developing countries, do not participate fully in the ISBN
system. They often produce books which do not have ISBNs. In certain industrialized countries large classes of commercial books,
such as novels, textbooks and other non-fiction books, are nearly always given ISBNs by publishers, thus giving the illusion to
many customers that the ISBN is an international and complete system, with no exceptions.
Transition to digital format
The term e-book (electronic book) in the broad sense is an amount of information
like a conventional book, but in digital form. It is made available through internet, CD-ROM, etc. In the popular press the term
eBook sometimes refers to a device such as the Sony Librie
EBR-1000EP, which is meant to read the digital form and present it to a human being.
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 as
made available online e.g. through a digital library, on CD-ROM, or in the form of e-books.
On the other hand, though books are nowadays produced using a digital version of the content, for most books such a version is
not available to the public (i.e. neither in the library nor on internet), and there is no decline in the rate of paper
publishing. There is an effort, however, to convert books that are in the public domain into a digital medium for unlimited redistribution and infinite availability. The 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 print on demand have made it easier for less known authors to make their work available to a larger
audience.
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