Before the invention of the printing press, books were individually made. Wooden blocks were carved and inked to print pages, but could only be used once. Many books were written and illustrated by hand, making each copy unique. Because they took so much time to make, books were very expensive and only richer people could afford them. Toggle text. What is a nonfiction book? But the earliest examples of "writing" — either on stone slabs or impressed onto pieces of bark — were more to record numbers, lists, or convey information.
People needed to document their accounts, so in fact the very first written notes were more to convey maths than literature! The ancient Egyptians were the first society to use "pages", as such. They did this by weaving together stems of a papyrus plant , then flattening the woven stems by pounding them flat.
This created a "page", which, when glued together, became a scroll. This technique was used for hundreds of years and the Greeks and Romans soon adopted it. They would carefully wrap the scroll around a large piece of wood so it could be stored or transported and then unwound in a very grand gesture, to be read out loud.
This method was used until the 8th century AD. Slightly before this time, in another part of the world, parchment such as calf skin , or deer skin , began to be used as it was less likely to tear, and there was a shortage of papyrus. The parchment would be treated in alkaline then written over in ink. The Greeks and Romans also invented wax tablets , which were blocks of wood layered with wax so you could scratch a message into them, then erase them and re-use them again and again sort of like an etch-a-sketch!
The first actual book written on paper is said to have been made in China. It was created using mulberries, hemp, bark and even fish to form a big pulp, that could be pressed and dried to form paper. Each sheet of paper was roughly the size of a newspaper and called a "leaf". As soon as the leaf was printed upon with ink by using wooden printing blocks , it was known as a "folio", which is another word for leaf.
Gradually, individual books, which were highly precious, were formed. Some of these books held highly important information or religious texts and others told glorious, wicked or wonderful stories. The first book ever written that we know of is The Epic of Gilgamesh : a mythical retelling of an important political figure from history.
In the 14th century, the Jikji was printed in Korea in movable metal type : a collection of Buddhist Zen teachings. A century later, in , a German man called Johannes Gutenburg built a printing press to print the Gutenburg Bible, which led to printers springing up all across Europe. A man named Aldus Manutious founded a printing press in Venice with the desire to create pocket-sized books that retold the Greek Classics.
His wish was for well-to-do folk to be able to pop the book into a satchel and carry it with them when cycling, meaning books could be transported everywhere. In , the first book covers appeared. A Brief History of Books How books went from handwritten scrolls to digitized publications. Books to-go More similar to the style of books we know today, the Romans created some of the first codices from as early as the 1st century CE. The oldest printed book in the world As the popularity of books was increasing, the world turned to a more efficient way of making them… printing!
The power of print Fast forward to the 15th century and printing had gone mainstream, all thanks to the invention of the printing press in CE by Johannes Gutenberg. Modern bindings From scrolls, to the codex, and now to glue-bound books — printing really has come a long way. Print-on-demand But what could make printing even more cost efficient and environmentally friendly at the same time? Inventing the eBook It was not only print-on-demand that transformed the future of books but the first digitization of texts by Project Gutenberg in CE brought reading into the internet era.
Google Sound and Music. Google Books One of the most used online reading resources today is Google Books, which is almost as old as Google itself.
Explore more stories about books The story featured may in some cases have been created by an independent third party and may not always represent the views of the institutions, listed below, who have supplied the content.
0コメント