What is a Book?

     What is a book? A book is many things. A book is a vehicle that transports us to new places and cultures. A book is a teacher that helps us learn numerous things that span anywhere between the most crucial life lessons to simple trivia. A book is that trusty pair of glasses that we look through to view things that we'd be blind to seeing without them. A book can be many things. I think they should not be limited to having only the definition of a physical paper copy. A book can't be defined simply as just paper sandwiched between a cover and bound to a spine. It could very well also be an eBook like a Kindle, iPad or any other reading devise. Why? Because I believe that a book is a book as long as it has a story to tell, characters to tell it and a setting for it all to take place in. In this way, I agree with Joe Meno in his excerpt from Late American Novel: The Writers on the Future of Books titled: A Book is a Place. Joe says, "...What I’ve come to acknowledge or slowly accept is that the idea of the book is more important than the actual form it takes—the message, the content being more vital than the medium..."

     Another trait that makes a book a book is the ability to stir the imagination with the written word and sometimes even a collection of stationary pictures. A movie can't be a book because a movie takes place outside of the mind and shows the audience a pre-imagined story directly through their eyes and ears. This is not a book. A book is an object that sends a story that is fueled by the reader's imagination into their mind. This lets the reader have more freedom with the story they experience than they would with a movie.