Books may be distributed in electronic form as e-books and other formats. In its "Revised Recommendation concerning the International Standardization of Statistics on the Production and Distribution of Books, Newspapers and Periodicals" of 1 November 1
nced that it is desirable that the national authorities responsible for collecting and reporting statistics relating to the production and distribution of printed publications should be guided by certain standards in the matter of definitions, classification and presentation," and so "in order to improve the international comparability of statistics," it defined a book as "a non-periodic publication of at least 49 pages exclusive of the cover pages, published in the country and made available to the publi