What is a book? Yesterday I would have agreed that this is an obvious question. However, after our book viewing today, I am not exactly sure what counts as a book anymore. Trying to make sense of all that I saw today and my previous schema of what a book is, I went to the Internet to find the definition. But to my surprise there were multiple, differing definitions to be found. Here are a few: def 1, def 2, and def 3. Although each definition has basically the same gist, there are small, yet important variations to them. As you can see, definition one includes blank bound pages to be books, while definition 2 does not. And definition three includes illustrated pages to be a book, while the other two do not.

One may think that by combining all those definitions you may get a solid definition as to what a book is, but I’m still skeptical. Judging from the range of books we viewed today, there are a lot of works that do not fall under those three definitions. For example, the skeleton book that cleverly only included text on the “skeleton” of the book (the covers- is that a book? The book essences- are those books? Or the unbound drawings of the turtles- are those books?…If such are not books, then what are they?

I think that these are hard questions to answer. And by no means do I think that there is even a correct answer. To me, this is a matter of opinion, so what do you think?