The author and how it began
The Book of Answers was originally published in English under the title The Book of Answers. Its author is the American Carol Bolt, who graduated from the University of Washington in 1994 and works as both a writer and an artist, known for combining text, images and interactive elements.
In February 1998 she first produced a limited artist's edition of 130 copies. The following year, in October 1999, the book was formally published by Hyperion. Its design is unusual: there's no page order meant to be read in sequence, and each page prints only a single phrase. Readers open it at random while holding a question, and whichever line they land on is their answer.
Why it caught on
It redefined the relationship between reader and book. A traditional reference book is “an index first, then look up the answer”, but this one reverses that — the question lives in the reader's mind, and the answer is decided by where the book opens.
This design turns reading into a small ritual. Add that each page holds just one sentence, and the cost of reading is minimal, which makes it perfect for those moments of indecision. That's also why it traveled across languages and cultures and became popular around the world.
The Chinese edition
The simplified Chinese edition was brought out in June 2016 by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press under the title The Book of Answers (Chinese edition: 解答之书) — the name by which the book is best known to Chinese readers.
The Chinese edition kept the core design of the original: one phrase per page, open it and that's your answer.
From printed book to online version
A printed book has a natural limit: you have to carry it with you, and how it's bound affects which page you open, so the same page is hard to land on twice.
The online version solves these problems: just open a web page to use it, the answer library can be larger than the printed one, the draw is purely random, and it can record the answers you've drawn. The form changed, but the core didn't — it's still “open it with a question, and whatever you read is what you get”.