Eco and Carriere do not intend to make a great brag of books they read and collected (they admit that there are books such as `War and Peace' and `The Thousand and One Nights' they have never read from beginning to end, P.269). The key objective of this book is to encapsulate their views on a variety of issues pertinent to the nature of book which are both thought-provoking and entertaining.To them, book is a medium for projecting the realm of human imagination. The value of book remains hazy with exponential acceleration in a cornucopia of new media formats in the digital world. However, Eco and Carriere strongly maintain that book is less ephemeral and more durable than other media formats (P.13) such as floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and DVD and likes the spoon and the wheel, it "once invented, it cannot be bettered" (P.4). They are not against information technology (Eco has a 250-gigabyte hard drive containing all his 30-year writing) but the current media formats can quickly become obsolete. Perhaps the use of cloud computing for data storage and group screenings can be a perfect solution if there is no chronic power failure and Eco does not mind wearing his pair of Polaroid glasses for unbroken onscreen reading!This book involves knowledge and understanding of "book" rarely heard and known by readers. Eco and Carriere are avid collectors of rare and ancient books on human stupidity which reflect "the mentality and culture" (P.207) of the time. According to them, book collection is a solitary and masturbatory phenomenon (P.327) and they need an "eagle eye" (P.148) to track around the world digging up interesting bits and pieces at less than market price. The most fascinating part of book collection is the search process instead of eventual ownership. Unlike other book collectors who consider antiquarian book as a financial object, Eco prefers his books to be in hands of an occultist seeking to understand human follies after his death. Carriere abhors book sellers to cut up books to sell the plates for profits. To him, they are the "sworn enemies" (P.169) of bibliophiles.The history of book is literally the history of book production and bibliocaust which represents a lengthy process of selection and filtering. According to Eco and Carriere, the whole process is rift with idiocy, bias, and other transient interests so that some books can survive for centuries whereas others are filtered out and destroyed. For example, The Nazis burned more books than anyone else in history (P.245) and Mao tse-tung invented the Little Red Book as an opiate to agitate people in participation of the dehumanizing political movement. Some of the magnum opus written by Proust, Orwell, Flaubert, and Colette had been rejected as utterly superfluous and nonsense by editors (P.199).This is a very impressive book with abundant anecdotes and thought-provoking ideas about book. Some of the anecdotes (i.e. history of book during the pre- incunabulum) might be arcane to readers who have never studied ancient and medieval cultural history. The hypothesis put forward by Eco and Carriere that the level of a state's political power is highly correlated with the rise and fall of book and art production (P.105) is definitely witty. Eco and Carriere also offer a caveat to readers that books can teach people about our past but readers need to check facts and exercise their critical faculties while reading books. They cannot take everything up at face value because books can be "misleading" (P.173) and "reading for the sake of reading, like living for the sake of living" (P.279) cannot turn book reading into something nourishing and sustainable.This book is highly recommended to librarians, archivists, bibliophiles, and e-book fans who are interested in western culture, history of books, and book collection.Two of the wisest men in the planet, Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrier talking about an infinity of topics. From their love of books, they talk about life and death, the preservation of knowledge in future times...They share with the reader anecdotes of their experienced lives, and tell example stories related to the topics.It is a book to enjoy with pleasure. To read one page, stop, and think about it.It opens 100 windows in your mind with every opinion or idea.About Amazon: I am and I always will be against Amazon politic of selling books only in kindle format. This is an evident blackmail to buy its specific product. OK, it is one of the bests products in the market, but I am a defender of freedom, and this politic is clearly against that. It is the same as if Nike only would sell me its sport shoes, only if I dress Nike t-shirts and trousers. Or as if I buy a computer, and only could be running with windows, without the possibility to choose another operative system.By the way: how is that I pay quite the same for the printed book than for the digital one... but I can not print even one page of the book that I bought?: MY book.I am very disgusted with Amazon. As a librarian, as a teacher and as a book's lover, this is an attempt to use culture to monopolize the market.This book is a rambling conversation about book collectors passions and erudite comments on culture and history. However, it could have been a lot more. I'm not as enthusiastic about it as others. I think it was a bit thin - like a long magazine piece rather than an actual book. It is an edited transcript between two very interesting intellectuals and I enjoyed it for that. But I do not really think the title is well matched to the title or subtitle. I don't see that Carriere and Eco addressed the "digital future" rather than to say the book is better. And then they proceed to talk about how old books can be collected. There is nothing "digital future" about that.And by the way, I am selling this book used, as I did not think it worthy of continuing shelf space.Best !Good book that I bought for a nice price. Package for delivery was wonderfull done so book came to my house as if it was new.You'll learn a lot about books & culture here. And you'll feel like you are in a room, along with Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière, in a sunday afternoon, just listening to a very interesting conversation.all OKA stimulating, inspiring read. A must for book-lovers.Ranging wide, moving amongst thinkers, writers and ideas. A delight. So much to think about and so easy to read it all again.What is an incunabulum? I didn't know and prior to reading the book I had the illusion that I am a literate person. I shall provide the answer later along with the number and criteria used by Umberto Eco for collecting his incunabula. Incidentally Jean-Paul Carriere also collects incunabula. The sole aim for the unorthodox introductory paragraph was to whet the appetite of the bibliophile reader.And now to the review proper which comprise:information about the authors;what the book is primarily not about;what the book is, that is its nature and content;what is the basis for anticipating that the book would be a treat to the bibliophile reader.Umberto Eco is professor of Semiology, medievalist, theorist, and novelist;Jean-Claude Carriere is a writer, playwright and screenwriter. In the body of the book I learned that he studied history. Intrigued by the fact that he co-authored with Guy Bechtel in the sixties a dictionary of stupidity (Dictionnaire de la betise - since reprinted several times) whom he met in the preparation classes for the Ecole Normale Superieure, I made a Google search and found that he is indeed an alumnus of this prestigious school.The book is not primarily about a potential threat posed the book by our digitised age because as the authors readily acknowledge the future is unpredictable. The book focuses on the nature of the book itself and as such predominantly on our non digitised past.To state that every book published to-day is a post-incunabulum is a truism given that 'incunabula' are all the books published between the invention of movable press in mid-fifteenth century and the night of 31st December 1500. The Latin word 'incunabula' refers to the 'cradle' of the history of the printed book. The Gutenberg bible was printed between 1452 and 1455. Umberto Eco possesses about thirty 'incunabula', though they include what are considered the 'essentials'. For instance, the 'Hypnerotomachia Poliphili', the 'Nuremberg Chronicle', Ficino's translation of the 'Corpus Hermeticum', the 'Arbor Vitae Crucifixae Jesu Christi' by Umbertino Da Casale (who became one of the characters in his 'Name of the Rose', and so on. His collection is very focused. It is a 'Bibliotheca Semiologica Curiosa Lunatica Magica et Pneumatica', or 'a collection dedicated to the occult and mistaken sciences'. For instance, he has Ptolemy, who was wrong about the movement of the Earth, but not Galileo, who was right.The reader can trace in the body of the book the circumstances which prompted Jean-Claude Carriere to write his Dictionary of stupidity. In the ensuing I shall only cite a couple of gems I encountered in the chapter 'In praise of stupidity':We are never far from saying something idiotic - as we can see from this comment by Chateaubriand, of all people, talking about Napoleon, whom he did not much like:'He is a great winner of battles, but apart from that, any old general is more capable' or the truly inimitable:During the Restoration, the ultra-conservative Archbishop de Quelen declared from the pulpit of Notre-Dame to an audience of French aristocrats newly returned from abroad, 'Not only was Jesus Christ the son of God, he was of excellent stock on his mother's side.'Fire has a special place amongst the worst censors in book history.The Nazi bonfires were intended to destroy 'degenerate' books;naturally in an age of printing it is not possible to destroy all copies, consequently in such an era this act has the character of symbolism.The Spanish in the New World were actually worse book-destroyers than the Nazis. They systematically destroyed Amerindian pictographs thus depriving us from a deeper insight into their culture.Thedosious I decreed in 380 that the Christian religion was the single official state religion and in the process there was a systematic destruction of hieroglyphics. It took fourteen centuries to rediscover the key to that language.But there are recent examples such as the destruction of the Baghdad Library in 2003.The crusaders destroyed about three million books during their stay in the Holy Land.Queen Isabel of Castile's advisor Cardinal Jimenez de Cisnera ordered the burning of all books found in Granada in the fifteenth century;half of the Sufi poems of the era burned at that time.Both authors approach eighty and reveal on the fate of their huge collection of books after their death.Umberto Eco owns 50,000 books of which 1,200 are rare titles. His wish is for his collection to be acquired by a single owner such as a University;it might be of interest to mention that his best selling book 'The Name of the Rose' was translated in 45 languages.Jean-Claude Carriere owns 30,000 - 40,000 books of which 2,000 are ancient. He does not aspire to a single owner after his death and the fate of his library will be decided by his wife and daughter who will inherit it.The erudition, breadth of vision, sophistication, and wit of the authors rendered the book a joy to read.Lucid and easy readable. It is a usable interview for a reader for practice and making a thought in his life from the first page to the end page.I personally had an occasion to make an interview with Jean Claude Carriere in Kolkata when he paid a visit in the city for his business and stayed at Grand Hotel. I was really happy to remember that occasion and had a valuable stuff for my story for the readers of that interview. JCC said that the failure is the milestone for future success if one continues to capture the subject or a script-writing whatever be in your choice.