Book

Book is a plain crafting ingredient whose whole value is downstream: almost everything a Book becomes feeds the enchanting system. Paper is the cheap half of the recipe and leather the slow half, so an early cow pen or a librarian trade is usually what limits how many you can make.

Bookshelves are the reason to mass-produce them. A bookshelf sitting one block away from an enchanting table, with air between the two, raises the levels the table offers, and a ring of fifteen of them reaches the top tier — that ring is what a book case wall in an enchanting room is actually for. A chiseled bookshelf does the opposite job: it stores written and enchanted books on display and gives a comparator a different signal depending on which slot you last touched.

An enchanted book holds an enchantment without being one. Combine it with a tool, weapon or armor piece on an anvil and the enchantment moves across, which is how an enchantment book is used and why a book is worth enchanting on its own rather than gambling on a tool. It is also the only route to a few enchantments: Mending never appears at an enchanting table, so a book of mending has to come from a librarian trade, from fishing, or out of chest loot.

A Book with an ink sac and a feather makes a book and quill, which is how you write in a book at all. Signing it turns it into a written book that can be read but no longer edited, and copied on a crafting table — though a copy of a copy is the last generation, and cannot be duplicated again.