A book is an actual medium for recording personal information in the form of text or images, usually written on many single pages covered together and protected with a glass cover. The most technical term for such physical arrangement is encyclopedias. The word has been around since the 15th century. Encyclopedias are mostly reference books about specific subjects, like geology, physics or medicine, which are available in libraries or used as a reference by students who are learning these fields.
A book’s main purpose is to record information. In such a case, the information may be written or recorded in a way that would be of interest to the reader. Such information could include facts about a person, an invention, a piece of art, etc. For instance, a technical write up about medical devices would need to mention the manufacturer’s name, the facilities that the device is manufactured in, its medical uses, and the medicines that are made from it, etc. A title page, or the cover, is what a reader will first see when a book is opened.
Readers will usually skip right to the bottom of a book when reading so they can quickly get to the bottom of the topic being discussed. To do this, some readers will make use of a footnote, which is a portion of a book marked by lines that serve to indicate specific words that might need to be filled in by the reader. There are many books with footnotes that are written in Roman numerals, Arabic, Hebrew, or any other alphabetic writing system. If the main text contains such footnotes, the reader can use the pointer to point to these words and fill in the correct information as indicated. This saves time because the reader no longer has to search for the definition of the word and fill in the blanks as he or she goes along.
Books with footnotes also have tables of contents. These tables of contents to give readers an idea of the various sections of the main text. There are those that have a table of contents that are separated into sections depending on the importance of the information that is being given. For example, if there are specific words that the reader might need to memorize while reading the book, he or she can mark them on the table of contents so that when the reader gets to these words, he or she will already have them in mind and ready to read the main text. However, books without footnotes would not come with tables of content and hence no place for the reader to put in his or her notes.
The last part of a book is what is called the copyright page. This is the very first page that the reader will see after the title page. Many books have many different sections within the copyright page, but most of the times the first section is the author’s name. The copyright page also contains the publication date of the book, the publisher’s name, the printing date, the language in which the book is written, and the edition number of the book. Since many books have many versions of their titles, the copyright page can vary according to each version.
Readers have a habit of flipping through books to find the section that they want to read, or just straight to the index for the table of contents. For this reason, many books need to have index pages that have detailed information about each chapter. Index pages are also called introductory pages because they give the reader a quick overview of what the book is all about. Since many people will skim through the entire book to get to the information they need quickly, it is important that the index be concise and highly informative. Furthermore, since there is no space for a description of each chapter of the book, the index must contain a summary of each chapter’s topic or idea.