Analyzing the book in light of the Anthropology of Consumption is a curious way of understanding the cultural values, on the basis of the route of this object which, once highlighted, sets the society hopes for reaching the universal nature of communication - role attributed to reading- but that adopts, during its career, new directions and connections. In contemporary society, amid the information age (fleeting), we can notice that the book, from the power of its materiality, carries fixed cultural significations , acts as a symbol of noble values and participates as an important element of a signification system and social classification. Having as the investigation object this complex material, in order to analyze it beyond its literary content, this research aims to understand the legible part of its material shape. Taking into consideration that the high cultural value of the book is, most of times, more than its primal role, we, thus, intend to understand its specificity as object and ponder about the established consumption relations, starting from a bibliographic revision on the consumption and the material culture approach fields; from the analyses of the representations of this cultural heritage in the media speech and the identification of the different uses of this artifact on the ornamental field – a trajectory that was mentioned by regular readers in interviews and architects in the architecture exhibition Casa Cor Rio, and by applying a questionnaire to young people and adults from different social status, making new reflections feasible or clarifying the previous ones.