The perfect gift for book lovers: a beautifully designed hardcover in which two of the world's great men have a delightfully rambling conversation about the future of the book in the digital era, and decide it is here to stay.

Jean-Claude Carriere is a writer, playwright and screenwriter, who recently collaborated with Michael Haneke on his award-winning film The White Ribbon. He has worked with many of the twentieth century's great directors including Peter Brook, Milos Forman, Bunuel and Jean-Luc Godard, and is the author of Please Mr Einstein. Umberto Eco has written works of fiction, literary criticism and philosophy. He came to fame with his first novel The Name of the Rose, a major international bestseller, and has since published four other novels, along with many brilliant books of essays. His sixth novel, The Prague Cemetery, is due out from Harvill Secker in 2012. Jean-Philippe de Tonnac is a writer and editor. His interviews with Umberto Eco, Jean-Claude Carriere and Stephen Jay Gould were published in the book Conversations About the End of Time. He is also the editor of several collections of essays, not yet translated into English, which include A Universal Dictionary of Bread and An Encyclopaedia of Knowledge and Belief.