Definition of "book"

What is a book?

That question isn't that hard, compared to "What is a work?"

It feels weird to call a random collection of short stories a "work", instead of using that term for each individual story (see http://openlibrary.org/works/OL152264W/The_Dunwich_horror for an example which contains three actual works, "The Dunwich Horror", "The Shadow Out of Time" and "The Thing on the Doorstep")

Hi-storian

Hi there. I'm new to the community. Surprised no one's chimed in on this before. The way I see this case, what you have is a "collective work" that, in turn, includes three separate works. Collective works can take a number of different forms, like collections of short stories, in your case, or collections of scientific papers presented as the proceedings of a conference. In either case, yes, the book is a "work" and the individual stories or papers should be listed as the Table of Contents. Only if the individual stories or papers were published separately as a stand-alone book would it be considered a "work".