What is the longest book ever written?

How do you count a book? Pages? Words? What even IS a book? It gets more complicated the longer you think about it. 

At the time of this post, Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, or Remembrance of Things Past) is recognized by Guinness World Records as the longest novel ever written. It has a whopping 9,609,000 characters! Guinness World Records uses a character-counting method to decide the longest book. This means that they count each letter, space and punctuation mark. 

Nonfiction books like textbooks and dictionaries can get pretty long, too. The Oxford English Dictionary contains more than 600,000 words! 

How do we decide what a book is? You might say a book is pages bound or stuck together. UNESCO defines it as a non-periodical printed publication of at least 49 pages, excluding covers. But what about books that only exist in a digital format? Some fanfiction, usually published in online communities, is over 40,000 words long. What about books that aren't made up of words? Herman Melville's classic novel Moby Dick was translated into emojis. Emoji Dick, written entirely in emojis, takes up 735 pages and approximately 10,000 sentences. 

Interested in learning more about books? Book it to the library and check out these great reads!

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