ABSTRACT
Everyone today knows what a book looks like. While the size and number of pages vary and the subjects differ, most follow a standard format. They are bound, whether by sewing or with the not-so-perfect glue, in hard or soft covers. The spine has the title, the author, and the publisher’s name or logo. The dust-jacket or back cover carries ‘information’ to entice the buyer, such as favorable quotes from famous people or a photograph of the famous person who wrote the book. Inside the book a title page proclaims the author and title, the publisher, place, and date of publication. Some of this information may appear on the back of the title page along with the copyright, but it is all there, up front. Dedications are brief. Tables of contents are at the front or the back, never in the middle; indices and bibliography are at the back. The text comes in between these search aids. The pages are numbered, with the text broken down into chapters that are themselves subdivided into paragraphs, each beginning on a new line and sometimes with the first word indented; then sentences, carefully marked by periods; and finally words, separated from each other by spaces and/or punctuation. Various embellishments are possible: footnotes at the bottom of the page or notes at the back of the chapter or end of the book; illustrations breaking up the page or collected together as a unit. As you read a book, you have an immediate visual idea of how much you have read and how much you have left to go by the amount of pages remaining to the left or right of where you are.1 By a careful balancing act on a large table, ten books can easily be opened simultaneously for comparative purposes. It has taken over 2500 years to develop this object we take so much for granted.
