Once often a time, Elizabeth Hardwick had told “The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, It gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.”

A book can be defined as the collection of narrated, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made up of paper, parchment,  or other various matters like palm leaves, wood slabs,  burnt clay slabs or copper sheets. Each sheet of the book is known as leaf, and each side of leaf is known as page. Now days, books are also produced in electronic format which are known as e-books or electronic books.

In ancient India, the people were writing the books on the leaves of the palm trees. Those leaves were tied with the threads to make the books. The copper slabs were also used to write on them to make the books. Many people were also using the wood slabs for this purpose. The main basis of the book writing was based on the Vedas and Upanishads at that time.

But, now many kinds of books are written with different kinds of texts, poem collections, story collections, novels etc. In Mesopotamian civilization the people used to write on the clay slabs and made them burnt with the fire and made them books to read. In China also the Chinese invented paper from unused clothes and they used those to make them into books by writing on them.

In the very ancient time when no civilization was there and the man was the cave dwellers, the people used to write on the walls of the caves, and read those sculptures when they wanted to read. From these stories of the evolutions, the reading habits of the people can be observed from the very beginning of the civilization.

In modern days, the people used the paper to make the books. Many magazines, journals, news paper, textbooks are available by using the paper.  Those people who have keen interest towards the book reading are often regarded as book worms, bibliophilists and philobiblists.                 
In modern days, according to the need of the readers, many books like magazines, newspapers, journals, textbooks, novels and poetry books and story collections might be available in the bookstores, where the books are bought and sold.