Books are divided mainly into two categories: non-fiction and fiction. Non-fiction books are often about history, biography, travel, science or cooking among many other subjects. Books containing short stories, novels, dramas or poetry are called literary fiction. Some people like travelogues, detective stories, crime novels, thrillers, graphic novels; others prefer the romance genre, historical or science fiction. You can buy the book, borrow from a friend or take it out from the library. If a book is a real page-turner, it’s easier to read it from cover to cover.    

Some people prefer reading an e-book on an e-reader rather than reading a traditional book. It’s easier to purchase an e-book and to search for content in an e-book and you can also carry around a number of books on your e-reader – but you won’t find the distinct book smell in an e-book.

A newspaper is a publication printed on paper and issued regularly. Newspapers give information and opinions about current events and news. Newspapers often have comic strips and other entertainment elements. The opinion sections are called editorials.

Magazines are generally issued weekly or monthly. Some newspapers are tabloids, and are usually the popular press. They often have a larger circulation. The more serious newspapers are bigger in size (broadsheet). Newspapers and magazines can be bought at news-stands, in supermarkets and at petrol stations, and you can also subscribe to them.

Usually people read newspapers to stay informed about national and international events and news but reading English language press can also help you improve your English. Reading newspapers and magazines you will easily pick up a lot of vocabulary relating to news stories, as they are used repeatedly from one issue of the paper to the next. If you find a book or magazine that you are interested in reading, it is a great motivator to broaden your vocabulary too. 

almanac – évkönvy, almanach
best seller (bestselling book) – bestseller , toplistás könyv
book – könyv
booklet – könyvecske, füzet
brochure – brossúra, ismertető füzet
comic book – képregény
dictionary – szótár
encyclopaedia – enciklopédia
hardcover – keménykötésű könyv
magazine – magazin
novel – regény
paperback – puhakötésű könyv
periodical – folyóirat
pamphlet – röpirat, pamflet
picture book – képeskönyv
reference book – kézikönyv, segédkönyv
textbook – tankönyv

I) Fill the gaps with the words given.

1) If you don’t know a word, look it up in the ………………. .
2) ……………….. is a book, often in many volumes, containing articles on various topics, often arranged in alphabetical order, dealing either with the whole range of human knowledge or with one particular subject.
3) It took Tolstoy six years to write his famous ……………….. , War and Peace.
4) Is Fifty Shades of Grey really one of the world’s ……………….. ?
5) Have you seen my ……………… ? I need it for my homework.
6) Pick up your Italy holiday ………………..  and start planning your next trip today

acknowledgments – köszönet(nyilvánítás)
appendix – melléklet, függelék
bibliography – bibliográfia
table of contents – tartalomjegyzék
copyright – szerzői jog
dedication – ajánlás, dedikálás
explanatory notes – magyarázó jegyzet
footnote – lábjegyzet
index – betűrendes mutató
preface – bevezetés
text – szöveg
title – cím
chapter – fejezet
volume – kötet
author – szerző

II) Fill the gaps with the words given.

1) Who owns the ……………….. of this book?
2) ……………….. 12 of this book discusses the history of Sicily.
3) The period from 1940-45 is in ………………. 9.
4) Reading the book it is clear that the ………………… is a woman.
5) The program automatically creates a ……………….. to your document.
6) The ………………. describes also its main character.

Key:
I. 1) dictionary 2) encyclopaedia 3) novel 4) bestsellers/ bestselling books 5) textbook 6) brochure
II. 1) copyright 2) chapter 3) volume 4) author 5) table of contents 6) title

1. EMPLOYEES WANT YOU TO ASK THEM FOR RECOMMENDATIONS.

“A person will say, ‘I have a really strange question, I’m sorry, but can you recommend a book?’” says Phyllis Cohen, owner of Berkeley Books in Paris. “That is the most normal question. It is my favorite question in the world! Give me some clues. I’ll ask them some pointed questions and then I make a pile for them. When they discover it they’re over the moon—it’s like they have a personal shopper in the bookshop.”

2. BUT BOOKSELLERS ARE NOT MINDREADERS.

They want to help you find your book, but they can’t if you don’t know the book’s name, author, or what it was about. This happens all the time, and it drives them crazy. “Customers will say ‘I don’t remember the name or what it was about but it has a blue cover. I think it had this word in the title,’” explains Katie Orphan, manager at The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles. Sometimes the questions are so vague that no amount of Googling will help, and then the customer leaves unhappy.

Even a botched title is better than no hints at all. “One funny thing that happens with customers is they get the titles totally wrong,” says Marissa Rodriguez, who has worked in a bookstore for two years. “High school kids will say ‘I’m looking for ‘How To Kill a Mockingbird’ (instead of ’To Kill a Mockingbird’ or ‘Angry Grapes’ instead of ’The Grapes of Wrath’.”

3. THEY CAN SPOT THE BOOKWORMS FROM A MILE AWAY.

Just browsing? Bookstore workers can tell. “Cookbooks is one of the sections where that happens the most,” says Orphan. “Art books and cookbooks. The people who are going to buy books, I can tell by the way they look at them, touch them, start carrying them around in a stack. I can always tell when people come up who is going to buy a book and who isn’t.”

4. THEY KNOW WHEN YOU’RE “SHOWROOMING.”

In recent years, some brick-and-mortar stores have fallen victim to online outlets like Amazon which often offer the same books for a lower price. Some customers will browse for books they like, only to buy it later online, and they’re not very sly about it. “They’ll come in and use their phone to take a picture of the cover and barcode and just use the bookstore as the Amazon showroom,” says Keith Edmunds, a former bookstore owner. “It was awful. Seeing people do that was the height of ignorance.”

5. AND WHEN YOU’RE PLAYING THE SYSTEM.

“Some regulars would buy books one or two at a time and then within the two-week return window bring them back and be like, ‘I bought the wrong book,’” said Kat Chin, who worked at The World’s Biggest Bookstore in Toronto for five years. “You’d know they read them because you could see the book was a little bit worn or the spine was cracked.”

6. THE GOAL IS TO GET BOOKS IN YOUR HANDS.

One trick to get customers to commit to a book is to physically put the book in their hands and have them flip through it. “You can direct them to a part of the store, but that’s only half of selling a book,” Rodriguez says. “It’s important to get merchandise in people’s hands so they feel there’s already some ownership happening. They say ‘I like the way it looks and feels in my hands and I like the way it smells.’”

7. YOU HAVE TO HUNT FOR THE COFFEE SHOP.

Many bookstores, particularly the bigger ones like Barnes & Noble, have incorporated cafes into their layout. Alex Lifschutz, a London-based architect, told the Economist that putting the coffee shop at the back of the store or, if there are multiple stories, on the top floor, “draws shoppers upwards floor-by-floor, which is bound to encourage people to linger longer and spend more.”

8. THE KIDS SECTION IS STRATEGICALLY LOCATED.

According to Edmunds, the kids books are almost always located at the back of a store. “If the parents want to get a book for the kid they have to go through the whole store,” he says. “They’re hoping the parent will see something they want.”

9. SOMEONE PAID FOR THAT PRIME SHELF REAL ESTATE.

In many big-box stores, publishers pay for good placement on “front tables, end caps and window space, in the same way General Mills and Procter and Gamble buy space for their breakfast cereals and dish detergents in the supermarkets,” Andy Ross, a literary agent, told The Book Deal.

10. AUTHORS, BEWARE THE “SOCIOLOGY” SECTION.

No author wants their book tucked away in the “sociology” section, claims veteran publishing insider Alan Rinzler. It’s “a catchall section for ambiguous titles, and the kiss of death for book sales,” he says.

11. BOOK THIEVES LOVE THE BIBLE.

At The World’s Biggest Bookstore in Toronto, “the Bible was the number one stolen book of all time,” says Chin.

Other frequently stolen books? Japanese comics (called Manga), expensive medical books, and Kurt Vonnegut’s work. Chin also says Haruki Murakami books were so frequently stolen that her bookstore had to take them off the shelves, only bringing them out when they were specifically requested.

12. EMPLOYEES HATE WHEN YOU LEAVE BOOKS WHERE THEY DON’T BELONG.

“Neatening up a bookstore is a daunting process,” says Demi Marshall, a bookseller in Austin, Texas. The next time you pluck a book from its designated shelf slot, put it back when you’re done. Otherwise, “it’s like if you go to a clothing store and unfold all the clothes and then put them back on the shelf but don’t fold them,” Chin says.

13. AND WHEN YOU TREAT THE STORE LIKE YOUR LIBRARY.

“It’s nice to be able to go in and read maybe a chapter to see if you’re gonna like the book,” Chin says. “But then when you sit and read the whole book and put it back on the shelf, it gets grubby.” You’ll know a bookstore is trying to nudge you out the door if multiple employees drop by to ask if you need any help. “We would quietly pester people,” says Caleb Saenz, who used to work at Barnes & Noble. “I was at my peak passive aggressive phase when I was working at a bookstore.”

14. THE INTERNET HAS ACTUALLY BEEN A GOOD THING.

Before the Internet became ubiquitous, the process of looking up a book for a customer was daunting. “We had to look it up in ‘Books In Print’ which is a multi-volume, 4-inch thick, hardcover book,” says Liz Prouty, who owns Second Looks Books in Maryland with her husband, Richard Due. “It was a slow and cumbersome process and if anything was indexed wrong or a customer had the first word of a title wrong, you were out of luck.”

15. IT’S ALSO MADE US LOVE BOOKS MORE.

Some thought the e-book would surely spell the death of the bookstore. But many independent sellers say digitization has actually made people crave physical books more. “I’ve noticed in the last couple of years, so many people come in waxing rhapsodic about the smell of books, the feel of books,” says Prouty. “And they say it more now because the alternatives exist. People are deeply attached to the old-fashioned books.”

16. SOME BOOKSELLERS CAN IDENTIFY BOOKS BY THEIR SMELL.

Especially used booksellers. “These Penguins have their own particular odor,” Cohen says. That odor? Vanilla. Others might smell like almond or coffee.

17. BOOKSELLERS AREN’T IN IT FOR THE MONEY.

In fact, most of them have second jobs or need monetary support from family members. “It is definitely a work of passion for everyone that I know,” Marshall says. “We don’t do it for the money, we don’t do it because we have any power or prestige. It’s genuinely just that we love books and we love getting them into people’s hands.”

source: mentalfloss

Can you match the book genres and their definition?

Key

1. e. 2. d. 3. a. 4. c. 5. b.