Book
| Book link | |
|---|---|
| File:We-book.png "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin.[1] | |
| Type | technology |
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages bound together and protected by a cover.
History
When writing systems were created in ancient civilizations, a variety of objects, such as stone, clay, tree bark, metal sheets, and bones, were used for writing.
In the Ancient Near East, clay tablets were used as a writing medium. Tablets were flattened and mostly dry pieces of clay that could be easily carried, and impressed with a stylus.
Scrolls were the first form of editable record keeping texts, used in Eastern Mediterranean ancient Egyptian civilizations and by the Israelites among others.
A codex (in modern usage) is the first information repository that modern people would recognize as a "book". It became popular around the 1st century AD. Leaves of uniform size bound in some manner along one edge, and typically held between two covers made of some more robust material. The first written mention of the codex as a form of book is from Marcus Valerius Martialis at the end of the first century, where he praises its compactness. At first it gained popularity only within the Christian community.
Books were largely copied by hand until the invention of the printing press in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440.
The methods used for the printing and binding of books continued fundamentally unchanged from the 15th century into the early 20th century. While there was more mechanization, a book printer in 1900 had much in common with Gutenberg.
1st editions
Richard Grove highlights the importance of first editions, since inconvenient facts may be removed in later editions (the same is true for translated versions). There exists a story about Kurt Gödel who compared books written by Leibniz to those that were citing him as a source and found that "in a suspicious number of cases, the cited passages do not exist; either the citations refer to a non-existent chapter, to a missing paragraph, or to a page on which the supposed text does not appear, as if the books had been altered after the citations were made".[2][3]
EU regulation
The EU has plans to highly complicate the printing of books, by asking for detailed origin data for the paper used, the bureaucratic hassle so intense that very few publishers and supplieres can deal with it. Commentators remark:[4]
It can be assumed that the EU regulation EUDR (European Union Deforestation Regulation), disguised under the guise of combating deforestation and forest degradation, is aimed at thinning out the European book and publishing industry in a coordinated manner.
References
- ↑ http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/eng/We_(novel)
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20120305071900/http://theartmovement.info/aldus/aldusblog/?p=20 saved at Archive.is
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20160401053045/http://jaysanalysis.com/2014/06/10/philosophy-phoenix-arises-to-annihilate-degrasse-tyson/
- ↑ https://www.tichyseinblick.de/kolumnen/aus-aller-welt/eu-buerokraten-eudr-buecher-branche/
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