Books in the Orient
Books in the Orient
China
Writing on bone, shells, wood and silk existed in China by the second century BC. Paper was invented in China around the first century. The discovery of the process using the bark of the blackberry bush is attributed to Ts'ai Louen, but it may be older. Texts were reproduced by woodblock printing; the diffusion of Buddhist texts was a main impetus to large-scale production.
In the eleventh century, a blacksmith, Pi Cheng, invented movable type, but woodblock printing remained the main technique for books, possibly because of the poor quality of the ink. The Uyghurs of Turkistan also used movable type, as did the Koreans and Japanese (See History of typography in East Asia).
The format of the book evolved in China in a similar way to that in Europe, but much more slowly, and with intermediate stages of scrolls folded concertina-style, scrolls bound at one edge ("butterfly books") and so on. Printing was nearly always on one side of the paper only.
Printing Press
The development of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440 marks the entry of the book into the industrial age. The Western book was no longer a single object, written or reproduced by request. The publication of a book became an enterprise, requiring capital for its realization and a market for its distribution. The cost of each individual book (in a large edition) was lowered enormously, which in turn increased the distribution of books. The book in codex form and printed on paper, as we know it today, dates from the fifteenth century. Books printed before January 1, 1501, are called incunables.
List of notable modern innovations
- c. 1455: The Gutenberg Bible was the first book printed with movable metal type by Johannes Gutenberg.
- c. 1475: Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye was the first book printed in the English language
- 1476: Grammatica Graeca, sive compendium octo orationis partium , probably the first book entirely in Greek by Constantine Lascaris
- 1477: The first printed edition of the Geographia , probably in 1477 in Bologna, was also the first printed book with engraved illustrations.
- 1485: De Re Aedificatoria , the first printed book on architecture
- 1488: Missale Aboense was the first book printed for Finland.
- 1494: Oktoih was the first printed Slavic Cyrillic book.
- 1495: The first printed book in Danish
- 1499: Catholicon , Breton-French-Latin dictionary, first printed trilingual dictionary, first Breton book, first French dictionary
- 1501: Harmonice Musices Odhecaton , printed by Ottaviano Petrucci, is the first book of sheet music printed from movable type.
- 1511: Hieromonk Makarije printed the first books in Wallachia (in Slavonic)
- 1513: Hortulus Animae, polonice believed to be the first book printed in the Polish language.
- 1517: Psalter , first book printed in the Old Belarusian language by Francysk Skaryna on 6 August 1517
- 1541: Bovo-Bukh was the first non-religious book to be printed in Yiddish
- 1545: Linguae Vasconum Primitiae was the first book printed in Basque
- 1547: Martynas Mažvydas compiled and published the first printed Lithuanian book The Simple Words of Catechism
- 1550: Abecedarium was the first printed book in the Slovenian language, printed by Primož Trubar.
- 1564: the first book in Irish was printed in Edinburgh, a translation of John Knox's 'Liturgy' by John Carswell, Bishop of the Hebrides.
- 1564: the first dated Russian book, Apostol , printed by Ivan Fyodorov
- 1568: the first book in Irish to be printed in Ireland was a Protestant catechism, containing a guide to spelling and sounds in Irish.
- 1577: Lekah Tov , a commentary on the Book of Esther, was the first book printed in the land of Israel
- 1581: Ostrog Bible , first complete printed edition of the Bible in Old Church Slavonic
- 1593: Doctrina Christiana was the first book printed in the Philippines
- 1629: Nikoloz Cholokashvili helped to publish a Georgian dictionary, the first printed book in Georgian
- 1640: The Bay Psalm Book , the first book printed in North America
- 1651: Abagar - Filip Stanislavov, first printed book in modern Bulgarian
- 1678-1703: Hortus Malabaricus included the first instance of Malayalam types being used for printing
- 1798: The first printed book in Ossetic
- 1802: New South Wales General Standing Orders was the first book printed in Australia, comprising Government and General Orders issued between 1791 and 1802
- 1909: Nisthananda Bajracharya authored and printed the first printed book in Nepal Bhasa called Ek Binshati Pragyaparmita .
- Aurora Australis , the first book published in Antarctica.
Contemporary Era
The demands of the British and Foreign Bible Society (founded 1804), the American Bible Society (founded 1816), and other non-denominational publishers for enormously large and impossibly inexpensive runs of texts led to numerous innovations. The introduction of steam printing presses a little before 1820, closely followed by new steam paper mills, constituted the two most major innovations. 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 nineteenth century: photography, sound recording and film.
Typewriters and eventually desktop publishing let people print and put together their own documents, using staplers, ring binders, etc.
A series of new developments occurred in the 1990s. The spread of digital multimedia, which encodes texts, images, animations, and sounds in a unique and simple form is a novel development. Hypertext further improved access to information. Finally, the internet lowered 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 material, 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. However, electronic books, or e-books, have not had much success to date.
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