The evolution of the book - Julie Dreyfuss
View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-evolution-of-the-book-julie-dreyfuss What makes a book a book? Is it just anything that stores and communicates information? Or does it have...
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What makes a book a book? Is it just anything that stores and communicates information? Or does it have to do with paper, binding, font, ink, its weight in your hands, the smell of the pages? Is this a book? Probably not. But is this? To answer these questions, we need to go back to the start of the book as we know it and understand how these elements came together to make something more than the sum of their parts. The earliest object that we think of as a book is the codex, a stack of pages bound along one edge. But the real turning point in book history was Johannes Gutenberg's printing press in the mid-15th century. The concept of moveable type had been invented much earlier in Eastern culture, but the introduction of Gutenberg's press ...
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What makes a book a book? Is it just anything that stores and communicates information? Or does it have to do with paper, binding, font, ink, its weight in your hands, the smell of the pages? Is this a book? Probably not. But is this? To answer these questions, we need to go back to the start of the book as we know it and understand how these elements came together to make something more than the sum of their parts. The earliest object that we think of as a book is the codex, a stack of pages bound along one edge. But the real turning point in book history was Johannes Gutenberg's printing press in the mid-15th century. The concept of moveable type had been invented much earlier in Eastern culture, but the introduction of Gutenberg's press ...
