Professor Faber, the bibliophile in Ray Bradbury’s classic dystopian novel, “Fahrenheit 451,” sniffs a book and says: “Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land?” His simple observation embodies our love affair with traditional books, which endures because of how they feel in our hands and also how they smell.

The increasing popularity of e-books has some people asking what makes a book a book? Is it the physical qualities of paper, ink, and binding or the content? It’s true that the book as we know it started with paper, namely the Codex, dating back to 4th century Greece. In its traditional form, a book is a book because of paper, type, and cover.