Gherkin - real or representative scenarios? - cucumber

Question

Lets say that my app works with some books with real titles "The Old Man and the Sea", "War and Peace", etc., when creating scenarios, should I use real title like:
Given I have a book "War and Peace" persisted
When ...
or should I do something like:
Given I have a book "Book1" persisted
When ...
Option 2 is more generic, but artificial example. And If I use first option, person who is reading the test has to have domain knowledge, and he will also have some presumptions about the scenario as soon as he reads the title of the book.
Also, is there some simpler way for me to create data table without repeating data (in this case page where I have always to repeat 1,1,2,2,2,2...)? example:
When we receive book with following content:
| Page | Line | Text |
| 1 | 1 | a |
| 1 | 2 | b |
| 2 | 1 | a |
| 2 | 2 | b |
is this standard way to do it:
When we receive a book
And page 1 has content
| Line | Text |
| 1 | a |
| 2 | b |
And page 2 has content
| Line | Text |
| 1 | a |
| 2 | b |

Answer 1

First of all start with the name of the scenario, this name should be meaningful and should be like a summary about what is about the test.
Once you have the name then the other steps should describe a business flow that of course should contain domain language, because for example if i don't know nothing about healthcare, banking etc then why would I understand a test about a specific domain subject?, the scenarios are for a specific group of people (the ones that are working in the specific domain).
One of the BDD role is to help in understanding better the specifications and the application on all levels (technical to non-technical, but on the same business domain), to improve communication.
Now for your specific issue.
Given I have a book "War and Peace" persisted does not offer to much info since the title of the book says nothing about the test data; is a new book that just was added/created?, is a type of book technical/poetry or just some book?
What was useful for me is use a name for the the data that says something about the data used in the test.
If you don't have different types of books you can use any name, else a more complete name would be more useful.
As for the table, that represents a data set and you need to tell what to check and where; depending by case you could group some checks, if you can read all data at once or not, or if you need to specify the texts/pages.
One option would be to hide the data set and say something like:
Given I have a book "War and Peace" persisted
Then the book contains the expected content for "War and Peace"
in the first step "War and Peace" - gets/creates a specific book that is identified by this title
in the second step "War and Peace" - identifies a set of data for the expected result using the same name since is the expected for that specific data set, this set of data can be list/array/map ... depending of what programming language you are using.
Don't think to much to the details, just define the scenario in human readable language using outside-in approach, then see if you can refine it and after start the implementation.
Always use a description for the feature and a meaningful title for each scenario