A book is a printed publication with pages that are usually bound together in some type of cover. There are countless types of books in the world including novels, picture books, cookbooks, how-to books, poetry books and textbooks. Many people read books for entertainment, education and information. There is also a growing interest in e-books and digital libraries.
Despite the rise in popularity of electronic devices that can contain books, there is still a demand for hardcopy publications. Many books are published each year in different languages. These are often grouped into genres. Some of these include romance, fantasy and historical fiction. Some of the most popular books in history have been the Bible, The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons.
The study of books became an academic discipline in the 1980s. It draws on scholarship from a wide range of disciplines such as textual scholarship, codicology, bibliography, palaeography, art history and social history to examine the nature of the book. It seeks to demonstrate that a book is more than just an object of communication and exchange (often commercial) but a conduit of interaction between authors, editors and readers that operates within a culture and a political economy.
Books are not only an important medium for conveying knowledge and information but also serve as a platform to communicate ideas, emotions and ideologies. They provide a framework that allows for the expression of the human mind in an aesthetically pleasing format. A book consists of a cover, title page, copyright page, table of contents, introduction and the body of the text. The body of the book consists of chapters, sections and subsections that are written in a narrative format.
A book typically has an index to allow people to look up specific topics in a particular section. Many books are classified in a particular way and this can help people find what they want to read faster. The most well known system for cataloguing is the Dewey Decimal System. The Library of Congress classification system is also widely used.
Everyone reacts to books in their own way and these reactions can be based on the subject matter, genre or even the price of the book. However, these reactions cannot be separated from the materiality of the book and the way it is perceived. As such, studying the book provides a means to understand how the relationship between form and meaning is constantly changing.