A book is a work (which can be handwritten, printed or painted) arranged on bound sheets of paper and protected by a cover. In general, to be considered a book, it must have at least 50 pages, and it can be distributed in several volumes or volumes. Is named book to a work that deals with any subject and even that does not contain words, but only images.
Often a book is composed of a cover that protects the sheets, a spine that brings together the binding, front cover, front cover and back cover, body of the work made up of sheets, prologue or introduction, index, chapters and other complementary elements.
A book can be scientific, literary or linguistic, travel, biographical, text or study, reference or reference like a dictionary, and many other variants.
You can talk about books practically since time immemorial and through various production techniques such as cave paintings in the Paleolithic, which "imprinted" their memories on stone. Although in ancient cultures such as the Egyptian Empire (with their papyri) and the Babylonian civilizations (with their texts carved in stone) some diffusion of primitive books was achieved, during the European Ancient and Middle Ages books were rare and expensive and were produced by hand on parchments. Also, given the low level of literacy in European society at the time, only a few people could write with the precision necessary for the preservation of these manuscripts; in general, only a few nobles and members of the clergy succeeded in preserving the books at this historical stage.
From the creation of the movable type printing press by Gütenberg around the year 1450, with the associated lowering of costs, a "bibliographic explosion" began that led to the proliferation of printed books. The emergence and popularization of libraries are linked to this explosion that reached outstanding levels in the Modern Age and became more acute in modern times.
At the end of 1971, what is known today as a digital or electronic book began to be developed and in 1981 the first book of this type went on sale. One of the pioneers in the use of this technology was Stephen King, who launched his novel "Riding the Bullet" on the Internet. An idea linked to this technology was Project Gutenberg, which sought to create a totally free digital library. The current technical means have thus allowed the installation of a paradox; On the one hand, the appearance of the texts in PDF format or in the form of e-books have led to a historic step in the dissemination of the books, putting them almost immediately within reach of every user connected to a computer or mobile phone. However, the fear of dissolution of copyright could be a way of discouraging writers who make a living from the commercialization of their books, so that fewer texts would be written over time. The website itself has offered a solution, with the advent of micro-payment systems that allow a writer to charge small aliquots for the download of each of his digital books. Consequently, many librarians believe that books are actually in a transitional phase similar to that seen with the arrival of the Gütenberg press mentioned earlier. However, unlike those days in which the handwritten book became a collector's item, current printed books will probably never disappear from circulation, due to their portability and the pleasure that many users generate from reading, whether or not whether or not they are familiar with new technologies.
