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What is the evolution of books?
Books are the main tools used by human beings to record all their achievements, and also the important media for human beings to blend feelings, acquire knowledge and inherit experience. They have made great contributions to the development of human civilization. Therefore, regardless of ancient and modern times, people always give the highest affirmation and special care to books.

As early as 3,000 years ago, China had Chinese characters. These words are engraved on tortoise shells and flat animal bones, so they are called Oracle Bone Inscriptions. These characters were not discovered until 1899.

The evolution of books

It was the twenty-fifth year of Guangxu in Qing Dynasty, and an official named Wang fell ill. He knows how to treat drugs. Every time he catches the medicine, he has to look at it himself and suffer. Once, he accidentally found many things like words on a medicine called "keel", and he was surprised. So he bought all the "keels" engraved with this kind of words in this drugstore, and with his profound attainments in ancient Chinese characters in China, he verified that these "keels" were the shoulder blades of tortoise shells and cattle left over from the Shang Dynasty, and the words engraved on them were the words used at that time. On these Oracle bones, the general situation of sacrifice, war, agriculture, animal husbandry, handicraft industry, meteorology, political organization and cultural life in Yin Dynasty is recorded. Later, people called this kind of writing Oracle Bone Inscriptions, and these "keels" can be said to be the embryonic form of books.

Formal books appeared in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period more than two thousand years ago. At first, people wrote words on bamboo or wood chips and called them Jane or Xie. Chop the bamboo board into thin strips with equal length and width (generally 5 inches to 2 feet long), flatten the surface, engrave with a knife or write with a paint pen, and each piece can write 8 to 14 words. Some bamboo slips are woven with hemp rope, silk rope or thong, which is called "book" and also written as "strategy". The word "book" looks like a rope is put between several bamboo slips. Legend has it that Confucius broke the pimp many times because he was diligent and inquisitive.

This heavy book is of course extremely inconvenient to use. It is said that the bamboo slips checked by Qin Shihuang every day weigh 120 Jin. In the Western Han Dynasty, Dong Fangshuo wrote an article to Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, using 3000 pieces of bamboo slips.

At the end of the Spring and Autumn Period, books written on silk books appeared. This kind of book is called silk. It can be rolled up. A book is just a roll or several rolls of silk, with a wooden stick as the axis, so it is also called a scroll. Later, "Juan" became a quantifier of books. People often say that "opening books is beneficial" and "reading books breaks thousands of volumes" comes from here. This kind of book is lighter than bamboo slips, but the cost is too high to be widely used.

The invention of paper provided an ideal material for the development of books.

There was a man named Cai Lun in the Eastern Han Dynasty who improved the paper-making technology in the Western Han Dynasty, so books copied with paper appeared. This kind of book is also roll by roll, which is light and applicable, low cost and convenient to save, so it has been used until today. However, it was very troublesome to copy paper books by hand, and later it developed into block printing: one side can be printed, and a set of blocks can print hundreds to thousands of copies. The earliest preserved woodcut book is the Diamond Sutra written by Xian Tong in the ninth year of Tang Dynasty, which is kept in the British Museum.

Block printing is of poor quality and low efficiency. It takes several years to engrave a set of books, and a book needs to engrave many boards, occupying a lot of houses for storage, and it is not easy to correct mistakes when found. During the Song Dynasty, Bi Sheng invented movable type printing. Make a thick block of sticky clay, carve it word by word, and burn it hard with a torch. When printing a book, put the movable type blocks on the iron plate in the order of the manuscript, stick them together with rosin, wax and paper ash, and flatten the words with a flat plate, and you can print. Movable type printing is fast and of good quality, and plate making is relatively easy, and mistakes can be corrected at any time when found. After printing, take off the plate and the movable type can continue to be used. This is an epoch-making reform in the history of printing.

In modern times, with the development of paper industry and the improvement of printing technology, books were printed with new patterns, such as mimeograph, lithograph, letterpress, offset printing, photocopying, electrostatic photocopying, etc., so various books appeared.

With the wide application of electronic and laser technology, many wonderful books have appeared in recent years, such as talking books, moving books, pop-up book and micro-books.

Talking books are books with mini records or tapes, and some have pronunciation codes printed under the words, which can restore people's voices through electronic instruments. Some children's books have miniature records and needles on the back cover. After the stylus touches the record, you can hear the voices of the characters in the book as the record rotates.

What is more interesting is a book called TV Record, also called DVD, which looks like an ordinary record. It uses a special laser method to record images and sounds on the video disc. When watching, connect the video player to the TV set, and both images and sounds can be restored. According to the needs of study and research, you can also use it to stop the picture. When publishing an important academic work or paper, you can record some incomprehensible principles and experiments and sell them with books. Video disc can not only show the movement of objects, but also show many subtle phenomena. For example, the photosynthesis of plants, the molecular movement of matter, and even the rupture of nuclear can all be shown by animation.

There is also a book with three-dimensional illustrations. When you open this book, the people and animals in it will stand up and come alive.

There are many kinds of books now, some of which are getting smaller and smaller. "Microfilm" is one of them. It uses a camera to reduce books or materials to film, generally to 1/48 the size of the original book. When in use, it can be enlarged to the original size through a reader. In fact, this microform technology was used as early as19th century during the Franco-Prussian War. At that time, French spies photographed more than 3,000 pages of information on a film several inches long and brought homing pigeons back to Paris.