 With 284 pictures between the book's 533 pages, the book depends as much on its pictures as it does on the words.Selznick himself has described the book as "not exactly a novel, not quite a picture book, not really a graphic novel, or a flip book or a movie, but a combination of all these things".The book won the 2008 Caldecott Medal, the first novel to do so, as the Caldecott Medal is for picture books.