バイオポリティクス : 人体を管理するとはどういうことか / 米本昌平著. (OCLC #70234581)

If you are copy cataloging Japanese books (and don’t know much Japanese) you may be able to search for titles or authors quickly if you recognize characters in the simpler alphabets (hiragana or katakana) among the more complex characters (kanji).

Books often use characters in all three alphabets, but you can quickly learn to spot hiragana and katakana, as they are much simpler characters – you can also study and learn them, as they are (compared to kanji) very small alphabets. With practice, words can be typed/pasted into a search box, either by copying and pasting characters from a table, or using tools that allow you to type phonetically.

Katakana characters look more angular than hiragana, and are used for (among other things) foreign, borrowed, or technical/scientific words, so you may see them in names of foreign authors or in titles of science/technology books. As katakana characters are phonetic, you may even be able to guess a word’s meaning by sounding it out.

This particular title proper is romanized “Baioporitikusu”, meaning “Biopolitics”.