History of book writing and producing

Information about the Arabs book's production is binding with the medieval Islamic World. They were the first to produce paper books after they learnt papermaking from the Chinese in the eighth century. Particular skills were developed for script writing, Arabic calligraphy, miniatures and bookbinding. The people who worked in making books were called 'Warraqin', or paper professionals. The Arabs made books lighter - sewn with silk and bound with leather covered paste boards, they had a flap that wrapped the book up when not in use. As paper was less reactive to humidity, the heavy boards were not needed. The production of books became a real industry and cities like Marrakech, Morocco, had a street named 'Kutubiyyin' or book sellers which contained more than hundred book shops in the twelve century; the famous 'Koutoubia Mosque' is named so because of its location in this street.

The medieval Islamic World also developed a unique method of receiving information by reproducing reliable copies of a book in large quantities, known as check reading, in contrast to the traditional method of a single scribe producing only a single copy of a single manuscript, as was the case in other societies at the time. In the Islamic check reading method, only authors could authorize copies, and this was done in public sessions in which the copyist read the copy aloud in the presence of the author, who then certified it as accurate. With this check-reading system, an author might produce a dozen or more copies from a single reading, and with two or more readings, more than one hundred copies of a single book could easily be produced.

Modern paper books are printed on papers which are designed specifically for the publication of printed books. Traditionally, book papers are off white or low white papers which are easier to read on, are opaque to minimise the show through of text from one side of the page to the other and are usually made to tighter caliper or thickness specifications, particularly for case bound books. Typically, book papers are light weight papers and often specified by their caliper, or substance ratios.

Steam-powered printing presses became popular in the early nineteenth century. These machines could print more than thousand sheets per hour, but workers could only set 2000 letters per hour.

Monotype and linotype typesetting machines were introduced in the late nineteenth century. They could set more than 6000 letters per hour and an entire line of type at once.

The centuries after the fifteenth century were thus spent on improving both the printing press and the conditions for freedom of the press through the gradual relaxation of restrictive censorship laws which also involved intellectual property, public domain, copyright. In mid-twentieth century, European book production had risen to over 200000 titles per year. And everything is printed for us just to enjoy reading books.