Timeline of the Book
The book as a physical object and a commodity, from Mesopotamian clay tablets around 3200 BCE through papyrus rolls, the codex, manuscripts and printed books in Asia, the Americas and Europe to paperbacks, e-books and audiobooks in the 2020s.
- Category
- Engineering & Technology
- Events
- 31 events ~3200 BCE – 2025
- Generated
- by claude-opus-5-5
~3200 BCE: Scribes in Uruk write on clay tablets
In the Sumerian city of Uruk, administrators began pressing signs into small tablets of damp clay to record goods entering and leaving temple stores. About 5,000 of these proto-cuneiform tablets, dated to roughly 3350–3000 BCE, survive. Clay tablets, usually sun-dried and sometimes kiln-fired, remained the main medium for long texts in Mesopotamia for some 3,000 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_tablet~2560 BCE: Merer's logbook becomes the oldest inscribed papyrus
Merer, an Egyptian inspector whose crew ferried limestone for the Great Pyramid of Giza, kept papyrus logbooks dated to the 26th or 27th year of the pharaoh Khufu's reign. Found at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea in 2013, they are the oldest known papyri with writing; a blank papyrus roll from the First Dynasty tomb of Hemaka at Saqqara shows the material was in use centuries earlier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_Merer7th century BCE: Ashurbanipal assembles a royal library at Nineveh
The Assyrian king Ashurbanipal had scribes collect and copy clay tablets on divination, medicine, literature and other subjects for his palace at Nineveh. Excavations at Nineveh from 1849 into the 1850s recovered the tablets, among them the Epic of Gilgamesh; the British Museum holds about 30,000 tablets and fragments from Nineveh, thought to represent some 10,000 texts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Ashurbanipal~433 BCE: Bamboo slips are buried with Marquis Yi of Zeng
Chinese books before paper were written in ink on narrow strips of bamboo or wood tied together with cords and rolled up. A funerary inventory on about 240 slips from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng in Hubei, excavated in 1978, is the earliest excavated text on bamboo known from China; slips stayed in use until paper displaced them in the early centuries CE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_and_wooden_slips2nd century BCE: Parchment takes its name from Pergamon
Pliny the Elder, citing Varro, told how a Ptolemaic king of Egypt banned papyrus exports to rival the library of Pergamon, prompting Eumenes II to develop writing skins. Historians doubt the story, since skins were written on earlier, but Pergamon was a center of production, and Latin "pergamenum" gave English "parchment". Durable and foldable, it became the main writing surface of medieval European books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchment~85: Martial advertises his poems in parchment codices
In a short poem written in Rome in the mid-80s CE, the poet Martial praised small parchment volumes of his epigrams that could be held in one hand and named the bookseller who sold them. It is usually cited as the earliest literary reference to the codex, a book of folded leaves sewn at one edge; few pagan works appeared in the format before the 2nd century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex105: Han court official Cai Lun improves papermaking
The official history of the Eastern Han dynasty credits Cai Lun, a eunuch official at the imperial court, with presenting the emperor a method of making paper from tree bark, hemp waste, rags and old fishing nets. Archaeological finds show paper was made in China centuries earlier, but cheap writing paper gradually displaced bamboo slips and silk, and papermaking reached the Islamic world by the late 8th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cai_Lun~330 – 360: Codex Sinaiticus copied as the codex overtakes the roll
Christians used the codex almost from the start: Colin Roberts and Theodore Skeat found that nearly all early Christian biblical manuscripts from Egypt were codices. Among surviving non-Christian literary texts there, the share of codices rose from under a fifth in the 3rd century to a majority in the 4th. Codex Sinaiticus, a Greek Bible on parchment dated by its script to the mid-4th century, contains the oldest complete New Testament.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Sinaiticus~800: Insular monks produce the Book of Kells
Probably begun at the monastery of Iona and completed there or at Kells in Ireland, this Latin gospel book has 340 surviving folios of calfskin vellum with dense painted decoration. It shows the cost of a medieval manuscript: one estimate holds that about 185 calves supplied its leaves, and copying and illumination took years of skilled monastic labor. It has been held by Trinity College Dublin since the 17th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Kells868: Wang Jie commissions the printed Diamond Sutra
A colophon dated to May 11 records that Wang Jie had this Buddhist scripture made for free distribution on behalf of his parents. Woodblock-printed on seven sheets of paper joined into a scroll about 5 meters long and sealed in a cave at Dunhuang, it was acquired by Aurel Stein in 1907; the British Library calls it the earliest complete surviving dated printed book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Sutra10th century: Chinese books shift from scrolls to bound leaves
From the late Tang dynasty, printed and handwritten scrolls in China gave way to books of folded leaves, first in butterfly binding, in which each printed sheet was folded and glued at the spine, the most common form under the Song dynasty. Wrapped-back binding followed, and by the Ming dynasty sewn thread binding, which needed no glue and held up better to repeated reading, had become the norm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_bookbinding~1021 – 1154: Maya scribes paint the Maya Codex of Mexico
Mesoamerican books were screenfolds of bark paper coated with lime plaster and painted on both sides. A 2018 study by Mexican researchers dated this Venus almanac, long disputed as a forgery, to between 1021 and 1154, making it the oldest surviving book of the Americas. Only four Maya codices survived the Spanish conquest, during which friars such as Diego de Landa burned many others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Codex_of_Mexico1041 – 1048: Bi Sheng prints with movable clay type
The scholar Shen Kuo recorded in his "Dream Pool Essays" that Bi Sheng, a commoner, made movable type from fired clay during the Qingli era, setting the characters on an iron plate in a mixture of pine resin, wax and paper ash so they could be printed and reused. It is the earliest known movable type, but woodblock printing remained dominant in China, where thousands of characters made type costly to set.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bi_Sheng~1200: Universities copy textbooks through the pecia system
Beginning at Bologna around 1200 and spreading to Paris, Toulouse and at least eight other universities, approved master copies of set texts were deposited with licensed stationers, who rented them out in unbound sections called peciae. Many students or hired scribes could copy different sections at once, cutting the time and cost of producing a textbook for a growing body of readers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuscript_culture1377: Heungdeok Temple prints Jikji with metal type
Its colophon records that this anthology of Zen Buddhist teachings was printed with cast metal type at Heungdeok Temple near Cheongju, Korea, in the seventh lunar month. Only the second of its two volumes survives, at the National Library of France; UNESCO added it to the Memory of the World Register in 2001 as the oldest extant book printed with movable metal type.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jikji~1455: Gutenberg completes the 42-line Bible in Mainz
Johannes Gutenberg's workshop finished its Latin Bible, mostly on paper and partly on vellum, by 1454 or 1455. The future Pope Pius II wrote in March 1455 of printed sheets offered at Frankfurt, and his letter is the basis of the usual estimate of 158 to 180 copies; 49 survive in substantial part. By 1500 printers across Europe had issued tens of thousands of editions, known as incunabula.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible1501: Aldus Manutius issues a pocket-sized Virgil
In April the Venetian scholar-printer Aldus Manutius published Virgil's works in the small octavo format, set in a new italic type cut by Francesco Griffo and without the customary commentaries. Its compact type fitted more text on each page, and the series of portable classics that followed set a model for affordable personal books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldine_Press1710: Statute of Anne creates statutory copyright
In force from April 10, the British act gave authors of new books, and those who bought rights from them, the sole right to print them for 14 years, renewable once for another 14 if the author was alive; books already in print got 21 years. It replaced the Stationers' Company's perpetual control of titles and is generally regarded as the first copyright statute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne1820s: Publishers begin selling books bound in cloth
Books had usually been sold in temporary paper boards for buyers to have bound in leather. In the early 1820s the London publisher William Pickering had his binder Archibald Leighton cover editions in cloth, and by 1825 Leighton was producing a dedicated book cloth. Bibliographers disagree on the first cloth-bound title, but edition binding in cloth became standard and was soon mechanized.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookbinding1841: Tauchnitz launches cheap paperbound English reprints
Bernhard Tauchnitz of Leipzig began a Collection of British Authors, whose first volumes are dated 1842: inexpensive paper-covered reprints sold only outside Britain and its empire to travelers on the Continent. Although no international copyright protected British authors in Germany, he paid them, and the series ran to more than 5,000 volumes by 1943 and is often cited as a precursor of the mass-market paperback.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tauchnitz_publishers1860: Beadle and Company sells novels for a dime
Irwin P. Beadle and Company of New York issued "Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter" by Ann S. Stephens, a reprint of an 1839 magazine serial, as a 128-page paperbound book for 10 cents. The price rather than the format was the novelty, and the dime novel became a staple of cheap American fiction for the rest of the century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dime_novel1894: Circulating libraries end the three-volume novel
British novels had been issued in three volumes at 31 shillings and 6 pence, a price aimed at subscription libraries such as Mudie's, which bought at large discounts, rather than individual buyers. In June Mudie's and W. H. Smith announced they would pay no more than 4 shillings a volume, and publishers turned to cheaper single-volume first editions within a few years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-volume_novel1934: Talking Books program begins lending recorded books
Developed by the American Foundation for the Blind with RCA Victor and funded through the Library of Congress, the program began lending blind readers recorded books on long-playing records, along with machines to play them, in late 1934. The records, labeled for use by blind people only, were among the first audiobooks, and long-playing discs were used almost exclusively for them until 1948.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audiobook1935: Allen Lane launches Penguin paperbacks at sixpence
On July 30 the first ten Penguin paperbacks, reprints including works by Agatha Christie and Ernest Hemingway, went on sale in Britain at sixpence each, a price Allen Lane compared to that of ten cigarettes. Woolworths' purchase of some 63,000 copies secured the venture, and Penguin, launched as an imprint of the Bodley Head, became a separate company in 1936.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penguin_Books1939: Pocket Books starts the American mass-market paperback
Robert de Graff's Pocket Books, backed by Simon & Schuster, issued ten reprints, beginning with James Hilton's "Lost Horizon", at 25 cents each. Selling through newsstands, drugstores and train stations as well as bookshops, it showed that small-format paperbacks could reach a mass American market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_Books1943 – 1947: Armed Services Editions reach American troops
The Council on Books in Wartime, a coalition of publishers, booksellers and librarians working with the US Army and Navy, printed some 1,300 titles as wide, pocket-sized paperbacks and gave about 122 million copies free to service members. The program accustomed millions of readers to paperbacks before the postwar boom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Editions1970: International Standard Book Number adopted
The International Organization for Standardization published ISO 2108, setting a 10-digit International Standard Book Number (ISBN) for every edition of a book. It grew from a nine-digit Standard Book Numbering scheme that statistician Gordon Foster devised for the British retailer W. H. Smith in the late 1960s; the number moved to 13 digits in 2007, aligned with retail barcodes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN1971: Michael Hart starts Project Gutenberg
Given time on a Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the University of Illinois, student Michael Hart typed in the United States Declaration of Independence, usually dated July 4, and posted it for download by users of the ARPANET computer network. Often credited as the first e-book, it began Project Gutenberg, a volunteer library of digitized public-domain books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gutenberg2007: Amazon releases the Kindle e-reader
Released on November 19 for $399, the Kindle combined an electronic paper display with a free cellular connection for buying books from about 88,000 titles, with most books, including new bestsellers, priced at $9.99. It sold out within hours. Sony had sold the first E Ink e-reader, the Librie, in Japan in 2004, but the Kindle's store made e-books a mass market in the following years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Kindle2015: Court rules Google Books scanning is fair use
Google had scanned tens of millions of library books from 2004 to make them searchable, showing only snippets of works in copyright. On October 16 the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit unanimously held in Authors Guild v. Google that the copying was transformative and a fair use, and the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in April 2016.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc.2025: US audiobook sales pass $2.4 billion
Audiobooks, sold as downloads since Audible launched its MobilePlayer in 1997 and now mostly digital, kept growing: the Association of American Publishers reported US publishers' digital audio revenue of $2.5 billion against $2.2 billion for e-books. The Audio Publishers Association counted $2.43 billion in audiobook sales, up 9%, and over 750,000 active titles, up 43% from a year earlier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audiobook