A book is a printed publication that people use to share ideas, information and stories. A book is made up of pages enclosed in a cover and can be about any subject, from novels to cookery recipes, how-to guides and children’s picture books. People have used books as a way to learn for centuries, and they have changed the world in many ways.
There are a lot of things that make up a book, but the most important is what it contains. A book has to have editorial intent and boundedness: someone, usually the author(s) or editor(s), has decided what should be in and what should be out. That boundedness is what distinguishes a book from other forms of text, such as posters fixed to walls or inscriptions on immovable entities.
Once a book is written, it goes through a number of stages to become a published work. The first step is to create a manuscript, which can be handwritten or typed. Then the author finds a publisher, who makes and sells books. Editors at the publisher help the author improve the manuscript and edit it for clarity and consistency. Once the manuscript is finished, it can go through an illustrator who adds images to the pages. Then the designer makes a cover.
Before the invention of paper, books were hand-made from materials such as tortoise shells, deer bones or parchment, vellum or papyrus. Various inventions allowed the manuscript to be turned into a book: it could be rolled up like a scroll, bound with thread and glued together, or written on both sides of a sheet of papyrus, vellum or paper. Then it was possible to print a large number of copies at once using a printing press. This allowed books to be widely available to the general population.
Today’s books are mainly printed using a technique called offset lithography, which is an industrial process. Books are produced in standard sizes, which grew out of the sheet sizes that became popular for publishing 200 or 300 years ago. Then they are trimmed to size, and the pages are sequenced in order.
Some books have more than one writer or focus on a particular topic area, so are split into a collection of volumes. This is how encyclopaedias and diaries are made up. The volumes may be arranged by subject or alphabetically, or in any other way that is useful to readers. They may also have an index, or metadata.
The history of the book is an academic discipline that draws on research from textual scholarship, codicology, palaeography, art history and sociology, among other fields. It is a rich and complex field of study, which shows how the book has been both an essential part of human culture and a source of much of humanity’s knowledge. It has helped to shape the lives of great thinkers and influencers, and it has served as a medium for recording, documenting and transmitting knowledge throughout the world over many centuries.