A book is a collection of pages of printed text that is held together by covers. It is often used to teach, entertain or provide information. Books can be found at traditional bookstores and specialized bookstores as well as in libraries and homes. They are also available in digital forms such as ebooks.
Books have many uses and benefits and can play a vital role in the development of a person’s cognitive, mental, emotional and spiritual growth. They are an important source of information and knowledge, especially for students. Various types of books are written and published including novels, biographies, history and reference materials. These works can be classified as fiction (containing imaginary content) and non-fiction (containing content representing truths). There are also a number of smaller categories within each category. A popular example of a fiction book is the Harry Potter series and non-fiction books include The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons and Twilight.
The history of books is an academic discipline that encompasses a wide range of skills and approaches including textual scholarship, codicology, bibliography, palaeography, art history and social and cultural history. The study of a book allows the user to discover not only what was said or written but how and where the book was read, where and how it was kept, who it belonged to and what ideological or religious beliefs it reflected.
Most books start with a title page that lists the name of the book and its author. This is followed by a copyright page and then the table of contents. The table of contents is an organized list that enumerates the chapters in a logical order. A chapter can be one single piece of text or a group of paragraphs that are related to each other. Most books also contain an introduction or prologue to introduce the main idea of the book.
Nowadays most books are printed using offset lithography. The printing process requires a lot of preparation called “make-ready”. This includes setting up the plate on the press, cleaning up any mess left from previous jobs and ensuring that each sheet will print correctly. After the sheets are printed they must be trimmed and then folded. Most of these steps require considerable amounts of waste paper. Books are manufactured today in a few standard sizes that have evolved from sheet sizes and thus machine sizes.
Once the signatures are complete they can be bound into a case. This happens off-line and before the books arrive at the binding line. UVA librarian and scholar Kathryn Stauffer says that “making cases” is the most labor intensive part of the process. “There is a great deal of hand work involved in making the case. It is time consuming and can be very costly.