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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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- ... that F. Scott Fitzgerald said that his book The Great Gatsby was a failure in comparison to Willa Cather's My Ántonia?
- ... that in 1991, the Church of Christ, Scientist published a book it had previously rejected as blasphemous to obtain a $97 million bequest needed to repay its financially disastrous expansion into television?
- ... that Ba Than, a school teacher, wrote the Burmese history textbook used in many Burma high schools from the 1930s to 1950s?
- ... that Kanutus Johannis's ex libris is one of the oldest marks of book ownership from Sweden?
- ... that Mustafa Güzelgöz was called the "Librarian with Donkey" as he circulated hundreds of books among villagers in Ürgüp, Turkey, on the back of a donkey?
- ... that a book on polyhedra by Piero della Francesca fell victim to "probably the first full-blown case of plagiarism in the history of mathematics" when Luca Pacioli copied it in his Divina proportione?
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- ...that Black Beauty was banned in South Africa because of the use of the word 'black' in the title?(Pictured)
- ...that in December 1936, George Orwell went to Spain as a fighter for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War ?
- ...that Epigraphia Carnatica, compiled by Benjamin L. Rice, contains a study of about 9000 inscriptions found in the Old Mysore region of India?
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- 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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