A book is a Chinese character, pinyin: shū, which is the main tool used by human beings to record all achievements. A book generally refers to a collection of bound papers printed with words. It is also an important medium for human beings to blend feelings, inherit knowledge and gain experience, which is of great significance to the development and inheritance of human civilization. It is an important tool for human beings to spread and record knowledge.

General significance: Books refer to spiritual and cultural products with material as the carrier created by the same or different producers through spiritual and material activities and a series of production relations.

Books are divided into social science books and natural science books according to disciplines. According to the language, it is divided into Chinese and foreign languages. Divided into: ordinary books and reference books according to their uses. Content division: novels, children's books, non-fiction, professional books, pamphlets, bibliographies, scripts, reports, diaries, book collections, photography and painting collections. Features: Thread-bound books, hardcover books, paperback books, bagged books, e-books and audio books, books for the blind, and ethnic books.

Historical evolution of books:

Regardless of ancient and modern times, people always give the highest affirmation and special care to books. Hand-refined paper is especially suitable for China's calligraphy and painting, which can be divided into two kinds: raw and cooked.

Many great creations of mankind have gone through a long process of development, condensed the painstaking efforts of countless people, and are developing and growing all the time, and books are no exception. Take China as an example, it has a history of at least 3,500 years, during which people have invested more wisdom and labor. After repeated creation and improvement, books have become what they are today.

Generally speaking, in history, except some books made for special purposes, the development of books can be found in a little context. In the earliest communication, people may only use gestures or volume as a medium when gesturing to each other. Later, from the accumulation of experience, some fixed syllables were determined to represent a certain meaning, so human beings walked out of the silent era and entered a society with words and no words.

With language, human beings often remember what they hear by memory and then repeat it to others; Or spread your ideals and personal experiences through language. This purpose and method are similar to the functions of future books, so it can be called oral living books.

People's memory is limited in the end, and sometimes it will go out of shape. Spoken movable type books must have many defects. As a result, intelligent human beings have invented many ways to help memory, among which knotting is the most representative. We can call it a rope book, which expresses different meanings through the size, tightness, quantity and different colors of knots.

Rope books can be spread far away and preserved for a long time, which has some advantages over language. However, due to the limited change of its style, it can not meet the needs of the rapidly progressing human society. Therefore, human beings began to imitate nature, simplify the external image, transform it into a simple image, and then improve it again as a symbol of the image.

This kind of picture, that is, the embryonic form of existing characters, is generally called character painting. Later, after further improvement and evolution, it gradually became a stereotyped hieroglyph. After a long period of development, countless fonts have finally been achieved for people to apply. The appearance of characters not only opened up a new realm for human civilization, but also laid a solid foundation for books.

China's memorial was developed before the memorial. Oracle Bone Inscriptions in Shang Dynasty was mostly a question, but he could remember very little. In the past two weeks, Jin Wen has mainly memorized words. It was not until the Warring States period that chronicles made great progress.

Ancient language and writing are probably integrated, and what is said and written can be called "words". Oracle Bone Inscriptions is called "Ci", but most of Shangshu are actually "Ci". We think these characters were "elegant characters" at that time, that is, Putonghua or Putonghua at that time. However, when it spread to later generations, this Mandarin or Mandarin became an ancient expression.