The Books Portal
A 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. 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 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 still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's Physics is called a book. In an 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, crossword puzzles or cut-out dolls. In a physical book, the pages can be left blank or can feature an abstract set of lines to support entries, such as in 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 ebooks 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 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 place where books are traded is a bookshop or bookstore. Books are also sold elsewhere and can be borrowed from libraries. Google has estimated that by 2010, approximately 130,000,000 titles had been published. In some wealthier nations, the sale of printed books has decreased because of the increased usage of ebooks. (Full article...)
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More Did you know (auto generated)
- ... that the 2015 children's picture book Timeline chronologically illustrates major world events, including the Big Bang and the Fukushima nuclear disaster?
- ... that the 1998 books Jews and the American Slave Trade and Jews, Slaves and the Slave Trade rebut the earlier work The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, calling it a "handbook of hate" and "nine parts fable"?
- ... that Two-Way Mirror, the first full biography of English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 30 years, portrays the poet as a daring Victorian sensation and dismisses her image as an invalid?
- ... that the cultural scholar Hermann Bausinger wrote a book about the history of literature from Swabia from the 18th century to the present, published for his 90th birthday?
- ... that the book Sinews of Survival by Canadian ethnologist Betty Kobayashi Issenman was described on release as "a cardinal reference in the field"?
- ... that in his book Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein, Gerald Holton argues that philosophy from Either/Or influenced Niels Bohr's concept of complementarity?
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“ | Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom. | ” |
— William Shakespeare |
Did you know
- ...that in English language works the table of contents is at the beginning of a book, but in French and Spanish ones it is at the back, by the index?
- ...that print space determines the effective area on the paper of a book, journal or other press work, and is limited by the surrounding borders?
- ...that the craft of bookbinding may have originated around the 1st century A.D.?
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Web resources
- Bookbinding and the Conservation of books, A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology, 1982 by Matt T. Roberts and Don Etherington
- IOBA glossary of book terms
- Project Gutenberg - Free e-Books
- Words at Large: The best in books from CBC.ca
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