Written Books are a great tool to give depth to a Minecraft world. They can make a multiplayer server more authentic and real, and they can be given as part of a quest. They can also be a very nice way to share information.
To copy a Book in Survival or in a multiplayer server, you need to put the original book and a Book & Quill together in the Crafting Table. This will turn the Book & Quill into a copy of the original Book, which will not be consumed.
The problem is different if you want to copy the text from the game to an external .txt file or if you want to copy an Enchanted Book. Today we are here to see how to copy a Book in these 3 different scenarios. Let’s start!
What is a Written Book?
In Minecraft we have Books, Book and Quill and Written Books. Let’s go together through the process that goes from the crafting materials to the Written Book, which is the “final step”.
To craft a Book you will need 1 Leather and 3 Sugar Cane. You can find Leather as loot when you kill Cows, Donkeys, Hoglins, Horses, Llamas, Mooshrooms and Mules.
First you need to turn the Sugar Cane into Paper.
Then you need to craft a Book using the Paper that you just crafted and the Leather.
To craft a Book and Quill you need 1 Book, 1 Feather and 1 Ink Sac. You can get Feathers as loot when you kill Chickens and Parrots (related: How to actually breed Parrots in Minecraft). You can check how to get Ink Sac here.
Once you have the three crafting ingredients, you just need to put them together in the Crafting Table.
You can open a Book and Quill and write whatever you want in it.
This means that you can use it as a diary or to write down something. A Book and Quill becomes very valuable in multiplayer, where it can be part of a complex RPG world or it can be a way to share information with other players.
After you open and write anything on a Book and Quill, you have two options: you can close it or you can sign it. If you sign it, you will not be able to modify it anymore. You will also be asked to give a title to the Book:
This wil turn your Book and Quill into a Written Book and now every player will be able to open it and read it. A Written Book looks similar to an Enchanted Book from the inventory.
Note: in the game you will not see the name “Written Book”, you will see the title that was given to the Book when it was signed.
How to copy a Book in-game
Copying a Book inside the game is very simple: you just need to put the Written Book and a Book and Quill together in the Crafting Table.
This will give you a Copy of the Written Book. The process will not consume the original Book, so you start and end the copying process with 2 Books.
How to copy a Book outside of the game
Maybe instead of having a copy of the Book inside the game you want to “extract” the text from a Book and copy it into, for exmple, a Word document.
All your inventory’s items and their information (including a Written Book’s text) are stored in the level.dat file. It is possible to open the level.dat file as a normal txt file on your computer using an NBT editor. To see how to do it, you can check here.
How to copy Enchanted Books
You cannot copy Enchanted Books in any way in Survival mode. If you want copy an Enchanted Book you have to go through Creative. To see how to copy an Enchanted Book in Creative mode, you can check here.
Conclusions
There are 3 ways of copying a Book in Minecraft. To copy a Written Book you need to put it on a Crafting Table with a Book and Quill, to copy the text of a Written Book and paste it on a .txt file you need to open the level.dat file through a NBT editor, and to copy an Enchanted Book you have to switch to Creative. Thank you very much for reading the article this far and I hope I’ll see you again around here See you and take care!
