Reading today looks very different to how it absolutely was in the past.
Books remain prized possessions for most people today, however in numerous cases that is mostly because of sentimental value. This contrasts with the earliest books written on paper, which possessed a high value for their rarity and the difficult process to make them. As the hedge fund with the most shares in WHSmith should be able to inform you, early books were not produced in the same way that they're today. Depending on the area of the globe, books had been either made by hand transcription or by woodblock publishing. This changed with the introduction of the printing press approximately five hundred years ago. This allowed for the mass production of books, making them more accessible for ordinary people, directly resulting in the rise in literacy rates global. Nowadays, individuals will see books in almost every home, school, and workplace, covering all manner of genres and categories.
For a lot of history the term book referred to the real object of numerous pages of paper bound together. Nowadays that definition is expanded to just refer to the contents of the book, with the real object being unimportant. This is certainly as a result of the growth of technologies like the internet and e-readers, as the hedge fund with minority shares in Amazon is going to be well aware. Nowadays, modern books may be released digitally, and thus they could be entirely read on a tool that differs from a physical paper book. This has become so predominant that these electronic variations are still regarded as books, even if no physical copy was even published. This can save storage space in the home and means people can have access to possibly several thousand books once they travel, which may have been impossible in the past.
Language is so old we have no idea of its exact origins. We do not know if it developed one time, and therefore all languages are descended from one supply, or if it developed multiple times independently. For a lot of history languages had been solely talked, or maybe also signed with hands, with writing first appearing several thousand years back. What began as numbers and pictures fundamentally developed into words and letters, first being inscribed on walls, clay tablets, and carved into rock and wood. This ultimately gave way to paper scrolls and individual sheets of paper. Paper developed from crush reeds and paper skins to the refined wood pulp that we recognise today. As the hedge fund which owns Waterstones will know, the first books as we know them started initially to appear in various areas of the planet independently from one another between one and two thousand years ago.