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CHAPTER III
Attempting to Define “The Book”
BECAUSE of the ongoing changes in the form and function of the book during the present transition from mostly print to the com- bination of print, digital and multi-media, defining what we mean
by “book” presents more challenges than one might expect. As a life-long aficionado of the finely designed and produced physical book, my first incli- nation remains to think of the book as a physical object which, depending upon the quality and aesthetics of its overall design, paper, printing, typog- raphy, illustrations and binding, may be appreciated, perhaps romantically, as “a sculpture for reading.” However, the qualities of most physical books may not fulfill all our subjective aesthetic expectations, and whether they do or not, the book is often defined more abstractly both in terms of text, and as a medium for conveying a text. According to the Oxford Companion to the Book, the word “book” may be used both to designate a text and the vehicle in which the text is transmitted: the word “has long been used inter- changeably and variously to signify any of the many kinds of text that have been circulated in written or printed forms and the material objects through which those words and images are transmitted. The ancestor of the modern word ‘book’ is used in both senses in Anglo-Saxon documents . . .”13
In 1998, near the dawn of electronic books, Frederick G. Kilgour, the creator of OCLC, defined the book as “a storehouse of human knowledge intended for dissemination in the form of an artifact that is portable—or at least transportable—that contains arrangements of signs that convey infor- mation. . . . The electronic-book system, when fully developed, will need to
13 Oxford Companion to the Book, Suarez and Woudhuyen, eds., (2010), p. 543. 33