Julian Barnes

The New York Times' John Williams interviews humorist Joe Queenan about his new book, One for the Books. On the future of print books, which Queenan prefers to ebooks, he is blunt:

"Books, I think, are dead. You cannot fight the zeitgeist and you cannot fight corporations. The genius of corporations is that they force you to make decisions about how you will live your life and then beguile you into thinking that it was all your choice. Compact discs are not superior to vinyl. E-readers are not superior to books."

—Brian Howard

When the first issue of its new Chinese-language edition appears next month, the London-based literary journal Granta, a publication that has existed in English since the Victorian era, will have a presence in four of the five most widely spoken languages. But plans for the globalization of a leading quarterly that proudly calls itself “the magazine of new writing” don’t stop there.

“In five years I could see us with 15 or 17 foreign editions,” John Freeman, the editor of Granta, said in an interview in New York this summer.

Publishers are creating exclusive products, including an original essay by Julian Barnes, for 2012 (30th June to 7th July). The new IBW Collectibles range of special products will be available only to independent booksellers for the length of IBW. A total of 270 bookshops have thus far registered for the event. Hodder is producing a special limited deluxe edition of Gold by Chris Cleave which will be signed and numbered by the author, and will feature a slipcase, head and tail bands, a ribbon marker and different end papers from the main edition. Random House has commissioned an essay

Since Julian Barnes big-upped Random House creative director Suzanne Dean in his Man Booker speech, a welter of stories on jacket design have popped up in the Sunday supplements. The articles have roughly followed Barnes' line that: "if the physical book is to resist the challenge of e-books, it has to look like something worth buying". This, quite frankly, is something of a hoary old media angle, dredging up an "e" versus "p" conflict which most trade publishers resolved about three years ago (academic publishers about 15 years ago). Besides, "cover" design is just as, and arguably more, crucial