This is not the end of the book
(review)
2013
This is not the end of the book by Umberto Eco & Jean-Claude Carriere
"This is not the end of the book, but another chapter." (Umberto Eco)
This is Not the End of the Book is the transcription of an extended conversation, "curated" by Jean-Philippe de Tonnac. On one side of the table sits Umberto Eco, the Italian professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, writer of fiction, essays, academic texts, and children’s books, and certainly one of the finest authors of the twentieth century famous for his 1980 medieval mystery The Name of the Rose. On the other side is one of Europe's most distinguished screenwriters the French Jean-Claude Carriere, an eminent cinephile, a former head of the French film school and a frequent script collaborator with movie and stage directors, having worked with such greats as Luis Buñuel and Jean-Luc Godard or Peter Brook. Eco and Carrière do discuss the past, present and the future of the book and its place in the digital age.
Industry insiders predict that the traditional, printed book will disappear completely within the next 25 years in the face of competition from e-books and the easy availability of plentiful information on the Internet. In May 2011 Amazon.com, as good barometer of changes in book-buying habits as any, announced that it is now selling more books in its electronic Kindle format than in the old paper-and-ink format. That is remarkable, considering that the Kindle has only been around for four years. E-books now account for 14 percent of all book sales and are increasing far faster than overall book sales. E-book sales are up 146 percent over last year, while hardback sales increased 6 percent and paperbacks decreased 8 percent.
The book starts by putting the argument forward of whether the ‘book’ will survive the digital revolution of the 21st Century. "The end of the book" is, as