Books: Why are they always rectangular / cuboid? A failure of imagination that has haunted literature enthusiasts for millennia.

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Background:

In ancient times, there was the “scroll,” which is basically a super inconvenient book where you can’t arbitrarily access information on a particular “page” without some laborious scrolling.

Later, the “codex”—or “regular book”—was invented. It’s basically a stack of identically-shaped pieces of paper that are bound together on one side.

So far, so good. But there’s been very little innovation in book form factor in the last ~1500 years! It’s time to remedy that. 

Proposal: 

Let’s look at novels in particular (although the following description also applies more-or-less to non-fiction).

Novels usually start with a (relatively) basic introduction—perhaps a description of the setting—then the story progressively gets more complicated and detailed. The plot is usually the most complicated in the middle ~50% of the book, and as we reach the end of the story, it simplifies somewhat as most of the plot threads are either merged or resolved.

Thus, the structure of a story basically looks like Figure 1, where the size of the circles represents how much is going on plot-wise in that part of the book:

Fig. 1: Left: the start of the book—the introduction—is (relatively) simple, and thus is represented by small circles. The middle of the story is the most complex (and has the largest circles), and the conclusion has smaller circles again as the plot wraps up.

And yet, books normally consist of rectangular structures where each page is the same size! Ridiculous.

The solution is so obvious: if we stack those circles from Figure 1 together, we will end up with a sphere, as shown in Figure 2.

Fig. 2: Books should, in fact, be spheres—not rectangular at all.

This is a far superior form factor, and no physical constraints prevent creating a spherical book (see Figure 3).

Fig. 3: This is a more detailed zoom-in of the bottom of Figure 2. Now, the size of each page is properly scaled to the amount of plot occurring in that section of the book. Shown here are four “leaves” (physical pages), with a binding (shown in blue) holding them together.

PROS: Helps match the physical form of the book with its narrative contents, providing a superior reading experience.

CONS: It is possible that spherical books might tend to roll away, especially in windy conditions, which might make spherical books unsuitable for beach reading.

Originally published 2025-03-24.