Books may also refer to a literature work, or a main division of such a work. In library and information science, a book is called a monograph, to distinguish it from serial periodicals such as magazines, journals or newspapers. The body of all written works including books is literature.

In novels, a book may be divided into several large sections, also called books (Book 1, Book 2, Book 3, etc).

A lover of books is usually referred to as a bibliophile, a bibliophilist, or a philobiblist, or, more informally, a bookworm.

A store where books are bought and sold is a bookstore or bookshop. Books can also be borrowed from libraries or obtained for reading through the practice of BookCrossing.

Etymology

The word book comes from Old English "bōc" which comes from Germanic root "*bōk-", cognate to beech.

Similarly, in Slavic languages (e.g. Russian and Bulgarian "буква" (bukva)—"letter") is cognate to "beech". It is thus conjectured that the earliest Indo-European writings may have been carved on beech wood.

Blook, a recent neologism, is either an object manufactured to imitate a bound book, such as an on-line book published via a blog, or a printed book that contains or is based on content from a blog.

Book structure

main: Book design [[image:Bookinfo.svg|right|400px|thumb|Scheme of common book design

• Front cover: hardbound or softcover (paperback); the spine is the binding that joins the front and rear covers where the pages hinge
• Front endpaper
• Flyleaf
• Front matter
• Frontispiece
• Title page
• Copyright page: typically verso of title page: shows copyright owner/date, credits, edition/printing, cataloguing details
• Table of contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction

• Body: the text or contents, the pages often collected or folded into signatures; the pages are usually numbered sequentially, and often divided into chapters.

• Back matter
• Appendix
• Glossary
• Index
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Colophon
• Flyleaf
• Rear endpaper
• Rear cover

A thin marker, commonly made of paper or card, used to keep one's place in a book is a bookmark. Bookmarks were used throughout the medieval period, consisting usually of a small parchment strip attached to the edge of folio (or a piece of cord attached to headband). Bookmarks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were narrow silk ribbons bound into the book and become widespread in the 1850s. They were usually made from silk, embroidered fabrics or leather. Not until the 1880s, did paper and other materials become more common.