Is there a noun representing books, papers, magazines, and all the other things one might read?
Solution 1:
The word literature is not restricted to Shakespeare, Poe, or to concepts you were enlightened on while reading for an "English Literature" diploma.
The word is used in the industrial, commercial and technical aspect as any material that you would read. For example,
Please read all literature for which I have provided the links, before the next C# class. Some of them are in the form of blogs.
There seems to a whole lot of trashy literature in the dentist's waiting room.
I am glancing over the literature you have provided, including Anna's illogical analysis why the stock failed so abruptly.
However, in the technical and scientific realms, we seem to favour the words documents and documentation. For example,
- There is insufficient documents and documentation on the system we have just fried.
- Your team has not produced any documentation on the failure analysis of the production line debacle that occurred last week. We need you to document the failure to help us avert such failures in the future.
- These are the incriminating documents that were discovered, which include internal emails.
- This email and chat thread should serve as sufficient documentation for the tiny project we have just completed. It has documented every aspect and milestone of the project.
Frequently, the words document and documentation can be replaced by the more generic term literature. However, chat and email don't lend themselves too well to being classed as literature.
So to be safe, I would say documents and literature.
At management, they use the word information. But information is not limited to just reading, but also includes videos, charts, and other non-readable whatnots.
Therefore, I would stick to documents and literature.