This is Not the End of the Book, by Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carriere

 

There have been too many hand-wringing discussions on the future of the book. This is not one of them. Author and academic Umberto Eco and his friend, screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere are both uber-bibliophiles, each owning tens of thousands of books (this is not an exaggeration). They are also friends, whose cheerful conversations on the subject of the book are here collected and relayed for readers to enjoy. Your enjoyment may be conditioned by how strictly you want this pair to adhere to the topic in hand. They use books as a jumping off point to explore… well, wherever the conversation takes them. However, it’s a well-informed discussion, and although they’ve clearly resisted the urge to edit the book afterwards with the benefit of fact checking, there are few glaring errors. If you can forget about the point in hand being covered too strictly, it’s a happy experience to read two people’s discussion, rather than debate, about an issue such as this. There’s no polarisation, just two minds exploring a subject they care about together. Best of all, they’ve done the obvious thing when discussing the future of the book – they’ve put that discussion itself into a book. Nice. [Nat Smith]