What is a book?

After looking on the internet I came across a website,http://www.artistbooks.com/editions/wiab.html, where many people put in their two cents about what they think constitutes a book:

A book is something you pick up and read."
Richard Seibert
"What is a book? A series of little printed signs--essentially only that. It is for the reader to supply himself the forms and colors and sentiments to which these signs correspond. It will depend on him whether the book be dull or brilliant, hot with passion or cold as ice. Or, if you prefer to put it otherwise, each word in a book is a magic finger that sets a fiber of our brain vibrating like a harp-string, and so evokes a note from the sounding- board of our soul. No matter how skillful, how inspired, the artist's hand; the sound it wakes depends on the quality of the strings within ourselves."
Anatole France

"...All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been...is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
Thomas Carlye

"While many viewers may not think of books themselves as works of art, the idea that art books contain works of art is not foreign. To take the next step and experience an artist's book as the sum of its part; binding, text and visual imagery is not that difficult."
David Edlefsen

"In a book the artist controls the combinations and ordering of different bits of information."
David J. Henry

"Paper will stand anything you write on it."
Lenin

"In theory, there are no limits upon the kinds of materials that can be put between covers, or how those materials can be arranged." Richard Kostelanetz

"To understand something, is to understand the structure of which it is a part and/or the elements forming the structure that that something is.
Ulises Carrion

"No mode of creation is more direct or naturally arrived at than the accumulation and agglomeration of materials found close at hand." William C. Seitz

"There are three things which the public will always clamor for, sooner or later: namely, novelty, novelty, novelty."
Thomas Hood

"When you sell a man a book you don't just sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue. You sell him a whole new life."
Christopher Morley

What an author likes to write most is his signature on
the back of a check. ~~Brendan Francis