Books
Support this site: Immoral Tales (1994) - Lipstick Traces (1989) - Ocean of Sound (1995) - Tears of Eros (1961)
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Definition
A book is a collection of leaves of paper, parchment or other material, bound together along one edge within covers. A book is also a literary work or a main division of such a work. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book [Sept 2004]History of the book
Modern era
The development of printing techniques by Gutenberg around 1440 marks the entry of the book into the industrial age. The book is no longer a singular object, written or reproduced by request. The publication of a book becomes an enterprise, requiring capital for its realization and a market for its distribution. On the other hand, the cost of each book lowers enormously, which in turn considerably increases the distribution of books. The book in codex form and printed on paper, as we know it today, dates from the 15th century. Books printed before January 1, 1501, are called incunables.
Contemporary era
The introduction of steam printing presses a little before 1820 and following this the new steam paper mills constitute the only major innovations since the 15th century. Together, they caused book prices to drop and the number of books to increase considerably. Numerous bibliographic features, like the positioning and formulation of titles and subtitles, were also affected by this new production method. New types of documents appeared later in the 19th century: photography, sound recording and film.
A series of new developments occured in the 1990s. The spread of digital multimedia, which encodes texts, images, animations, and sounds in a unique and simple form is no doubt an invention as important as that of writing. Hypertext further improves access to information. Finally, the internet lowers production and distribution costs, as did printing at the end of the Middle Ages.
It is difficult to predict the future of the book. A good deal of reference materials, designed for direct access instead of sequential reading, as for example encyclopedias, exist less and less in for the form of books and more and more on the web. Le texte se sépare de son support. However, electronic books, or e-books, have not had much success to date. One can speculate that the codex form has a long future for everything that requires sequential reading, or for those texts which are as much objects of beauty as they are foundations for information : novels, essays, comic books or art books. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_book [Nov 2005]