We pick up and read books all the time. They are made up of words and pictures printed on paper, and they have been around for thousands of years. The final product looks fairly simple, but have you ever wondered how it all gets put together? It turns out that creating a book involves an unbelievable amount of work performed by dozens of people!
In 2001, we created two books:
- "How Stuff Works" is a full-color, illustrated guide to -- you guessed it -- how stuff works. It contains over 140 of the most popular articles on the site and combines them with amazing new illustrations and photographs.
- "How Much Does the Earth Weigh?" is a fun, fascinating book containing more than 100 of the most popular questions from our Web site's Question of the Day feature.
In this edition of HowStuffWorks
, we'll take you behind the scenes to see how the books "How Stuff Works" and "How Much Does the Earth Weigh?" were created. It's good to keep in mind, as you are reading this article, that we were actually working on both books simultaneously so that they would have the same release date. As you will see, this kept everyone very busy!
Some of the book engineers!
Listed from left to right:
Back row - Karim, Rick, Tom, Gary, Jeff, Julia, Beth, Kevin
Middle row - Scott, Katherine, Debra, Craig, Michael, Bobby
Front row - Marshall, Sally