  Books have been widely used to share information and contribute to human
knowledge. However, the quantitative use of books as a method of scholarly
communication is relatively unexamined compared to journal articles and
conference papers. This study uses the COCI dataset (a comprehensive open
citation dataset provided by OpenCitations) to explore books' roles in
scholarly communication. The COCI data we analyzed includes 445,826,118
citations from 46,534,705 bibliographic entities. By analyzing such a large
amount of data, we provide a thorough, multifaceted understanding of books.
Among the investigated factors are 1) temporal changes to book citations; 2)
book citation distributions; 3) years to citation peak; 4) citation half-life;
and 5) characteristics of the most-cited books. Results show that books have
received less than 4% of total citations, and have been cited mainly by journal
articles. Moreover, 97.96% of books have been cited fewer than ten times. Books
take longer than other bibliographic materials to reach peak citation levels,
yet are cited for the same duration as journal articles. Most-cited books tend
to cover general (yet essential) topics, theories, and technological concepts
in mathematics and statistics.
