Books are traded at both regular stores and specialized bookstores, and people can read borrowed books, often for free, at libraries. An avid reader or collector of books is a bibliophile or, colloquially, 'bookworm'. Books may be distributed in electronic form as ebooks and other formats.Īlthough 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. Some physical books are made with pages thick and sturdy enough to support other physical objects, like a scrapbook or photograph album. 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, appointment book, autograph book, notebook, diary or sketchbook. Books can consist only of drawings, engravings or photographs, crossword puzzles or cut-out dolls. The intellectual content in a physical book need not be a composition, nor even be 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. Each part of Aristotle's Physics is called a book. 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.

A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page.Īs 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 the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. The technical term for this physical arrangement is codex (plural, codices). The Gutenberg Bible, one of the first books to be printed using the printing press LiteratureĪ 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.

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