"I imagine there will be paper books, at least until people like me die out. But I don't think there's any reason to worry about it. I remember talking to my grandparents when I was a little kid and they both told me about the first time they had seen an airplane and the first time they had seen an automobile and they both would say, 'This'll never work.' But that's how progress works. That's how the future happens."

The latest news about Amazon may sound like an Ian Fleming plot, replete with secret labs and Q-like gadget experts. The New York Times reported that the job board for Lab 126, the division of Amazon responsible for the Kindle, is offering "a flurry of listings related to electronics hardware, with titles like Supply Chain Project Program Manager, Hardware Engineer and RF Systems Engineer."

While some of these new employees "will most likely work on the next versions of the Kindle," the Times suggested that "there's also a good chance these engineers will be recruited to build other gadgets that Amazon is prototyping in its secret labs."

A person "with direct knowledge of the company’s plans" told the Times that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos's "original goal for the lab was to build a range of other devices. There was talk of music players and other electronics."

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Plastic Logic has canceled plans for its much-delayed Que e-reader. CNET reported that with a proposed retail price starting at $649, "the Que was priced well above the iPad and many notebook computers, not to mention all other e-readers on the market."

In a statement, the company's CEO Richard Archuleta said, "We recognize the market has dramatically changed, and with the product delays we have experienced, it no longer makes sense for us to move forward with our first-generation electronic reading product. This was a hard decision, but (it) is the best one for our company, our investors and our customers."

He added that Plastic Logic would "take the necessary time needed to re-enter the market as we refocus, redesign and retool for our next-generation ProReader product."

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McNally Jackson bookstore in New York City will be getting an Espresso Book Machine. Owner Sarah McNally told the Observer "there have been technical issues, but I believe we are on track."

Buyer John Turner expressed enthusiasm at the prospect: "For me the biggest issue is, quite simply, as a medium-sized bookshop we can't fit every book in the world on our shelves. This will let us provide a wider variety to our customers."

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The three branches of Camden, N.J., Public Library that had been threatened with closure later this year due to budget cuts will be saved. The Camden City Council "is expected to approve a resolution allowing the Camden County library system to take over the three facilities without a citywide vote," the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

"After learning that the library board's only solution was to close our libraries, I knew I would not let that happen," said Camden Mayor Dana L. Redd.

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Dawson's Books, Los Angeles, Calif., is holding a moving sale this month (August 7 to 21). The bookshop's website notes that owner Michael Dawson "will still retain his book and photo appraisal business as well as his on-line business for fine art and historical photography (www.michaeldawsongallery.com) and rare books on photography and California history (www.dawsonbooks.com). He will also be available at a new location by appointment only."

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On October 13, author Pat Conroy will announce the National Book Award finalists during an event at Flannery O'Connor's childhood home in Savannah, Ga., the Los Angeles Times Jacket Copy blog reported.

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"An afternoon spent in downtown Brattleboro, Vt., is like a few hours in a time warp," observed Delia Cabe on Boston.com, where she highlighted a number of "independent bookstores within several blocks of each other."

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There may be more readers wanting to join book clubs than there are book clubs willing to accommodate them, but Gary Clement's Summer Book Club in the National Post welcomes everyone to an illustrated discussion of--thus far--Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, 52 Pick-Up by Elmore Leonard, I Know What I Am, but What Are You? by Samantha Bee, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein, Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby and Barney's Version by Mordecai Richler.

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Mapping the world of bookstores. Have you checked out the Millions' Collaborative Atlas of Book Stores and Literary Places lately?

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Far out summer reading on NPR. Don Lattin, author of The Harvard Psychedelic Club, recommended "Three Books to Take You on That Long, Strange Trip" and observed that on the 50th anniversary of Timothy Leary's magic mushroom experimentation, "perhaps it's time to look back at 'the high priest of LSD' and a few other men who gave birth to the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s." Suggested titles were The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In, edited by Robert Forte, and Birth of a Psychedelic Culture by Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner.

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In a bit of Eat Pray Love counter-programming (a popular diversion lately), Flavorwire noted that "designer Sue Wong has even launched a line of Eat Pray Love-branded clothing. But since her costume-y designs are leaving us a bit cold, we couldn't help but thinking about which of our favorite literary characters might provide better sartorial inspiration." Thus: Literature's 10 Best-Dressed Characters.

The Awl subsequently raised the fashion stakes with The Truly Best-Dressed Characters in Literature.

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Book trailer of the day: Zero History by William Gibson (Putnam), which will be released September 7.

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In Buenos Aires this week, indie publisher association Alianza de Editores Independientes de la Argentina (EDINAR) is showcasing its Hot 20, for which "20 publishers chose one book each from their catalogues to be part of a Hot List, available and prominently displayed at different bookstores--these are not their best sellers, but the books that they feel deserve more of the spotlight than they’re currently getting," the Buenos Aires Herald reported.

The future of old books as art and design objects was considered by the New York Times, which advised readers to "set aside any emotional attachment you may feel toward the reading of physical books; the truth is that creative uses for books that do not involve engaging with words on a page already abound."

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In response to the Times piece--as well as last week's announcement by Google that there are 129,864,880 books in the world and other recent developments--Chad Post invoked Julio Cortazar’s short story "End of the World of the End" on his Three Percent blog, with select quotes including:

"As the scribes will persist, the few readers there are in the world are going to have to change their roles and become scribes themselves. More and more countries will be made up of scribes, and more and more factories will be necessary to manufacture paper and ink, the scribes by day and the machines by night to print the scribes’ work. First the libraries will overflow the houses, then the municipalities decide (now we’re really into in) to sacrifice their children’s playgrounds to enlarge the libraries. Then the theaters will go, then the maternity homes, slaughterhouses, bars, hospitals. The poor use the books like bricks, they stick them together with cement and build walls of books and live in cabins of books."

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If you're one of those rare booklovers who lacks a sufficient number of unshelved books to create precarious stacks everywhere, Entertainment Weekly's Shelf Life blog found just the right solution for your dilemma: stacked paperback wallpaper.

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Artist Jane Mount "taps into this emotional connection with her project Ideal Bookshelf, a series of paintings which capture the spines of peoples favorite books," the National Post's Afterword blog reported.

"We show off our books on shelves like merit badges, because we’re proud of the ideas we’ve ingested to make us who we are, and we hope to connect with others based on that. I think this is endearing and charming," Mount said. "When I paint someone else’s favorites and they have the same book I have in mine, I feel closer to them, like we must understand each other in some meaningful way."

Mount even takes custom orders: Just "send in a photograph of your favorite books, in a row or in a pile, and Mount will lovingly render them in gouache and ink on paper. As of Monday, she’s posted 80 paintings on her website, Ideal Bookshelf," the National Post wrote.

Today on the Diane Rehm Show: Peter Miller, author of The Smart Swarm: How Understanding Flocks, Schools, and Colonies Can Make Us Better at Communicating, Decision Making, and Getting Things Done (Avery, $26, 9781583333907/1583333908).

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Today on Fresh Air: Edward Kohn, author of Hot Time in the Old Town: The Great Heat Wave of 1896 and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt (Basic Books, $27.95, 9780465013364/0465013368).

Fresh Air also remembers historian Tony Judt, who died Friday.

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Today on Talk of the Nation: Graham E. Fuller, author of A World Without Islam (Little, Brown, $25.99, 9780316041195/031604119X).

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Tomorrow morning on Good Morning America: Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (Penguin, $16, 9780143118428/0143118420).

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Tomorrow on KCRW's Bookworm: David Mitchell, author of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Random House, $26, 9781400065455/1400065453). As the show put it: "Glowing front-page reviews and profiles proclaim David Mitchell to be 'the real thing' and his new novel a masterpiece. Set in 1798 on a man-made island built entirely for trade off the coast of Nagasaki , the book is an adventure, a romance, an exploration of cultural dissonance, and most of all, a novel of precisely defined characters. How does Mitchell keep all these balls in the air?"

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Tomorrow on NPR's Diane Rehm Show: Rosanne Cash, author of Composed: A Memoir (Viking, $26.95, 9780670021963/0670021962).

StoryCorps, the popular NPR series that has also spawned several books, will have a new incarnation this fall when some of the oral histories are "transformed into animated television segments" to be shown on PBS's program P.O.V., the New York Times reported. The first of six will debut on P.O.V. "alongside its feature films starting on August 17."

Temple Hill Entertainment producers Marty Bowen and Wyck Go (Twilight Saga) struck a deal last week "with rights holders Nelvana and The Clifford Ross Company to generate family films based on the Babar children's books," Deadline.com reported, noting that Nelvana and Ross had "produced an animated series based on the elephant that leaves the jungle for the big city, then returns with lessons learned to become king. Those producers are currently in production on Babar: The Adventures of Badou." Bowen and Godfrey, however, "are shopping to studios a blueprint for a family comedy that will mix live-action with CG."

On the New Yorker's Book Bench blog, Meredith Blake expressed some concerns about both the content of the Babar book series as well as the prospect of turning illustrations on a page into computer-generated images.

Blake cited a 2008 New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik that contended "Babar may be adorable, but his story is tainted by ideology that is decidedly less warm-and-fuzzy.... The dicey subtext of de Brunhoff's books will undoubtedly present a challenge to the film's producers. Just how will they soften the books' pro-imperialist message?"

Regarding CG technology, Blake wrote: "Surely, the charm of the Babar books lies in the hand-drawn illustrations, in which elephants are reduced to a few monotone gray semicircles and two little dots for eyes; they’re hieroglyphs for children. Go ahead and soften the imperialist rhetoric, but please don't make Babar look like a 'real' elephant--with the hairy tail, scaly hide, and wrinkly knees that implies. Now that would be offensive."

Channing Tatum will star in a film adaptation of Craig Clevenger's novel The Contortionist’s Handbook. Deadline.com reported that production is scheduled to begin early next year on Robin Shushan's script. 

"Craig Clevenger's crafting of the highly complex character of John Vincent Dolan entertained and shattered us when we read it," said GreeneStreet's John Penotti, one of the producers. "Robin's adaptation crisply captures the gripping journey that Channing will lead us through."

The Crime Writers' Association announced finalists in three categories of the Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards, Bookseller.com reported. Winners will be named October 8 in London. The finalists are:

CWA Gold Dagger
Blacklands by Belinda Bauer
Blood Harvest by S.J. Bolton
Shadowplay by Karen Campbell
The Way Home by George Pelecanos

CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger
A Loyal Spy by Simon Conway
Innocent by Scott Turow
The Dying Light by Henry Porter
The Gentlemen's Hour by Don Winslow

CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger
Acts of Violence by Ryan David Jahn
Rupture by Simon Lelic
The Holy Thief by William Ryan
The Pull of the Moon by Diane Janes

Peter Lewis was born and raised in Chicago. He worked for years as a bookseller (Reed College Co-op, Cody's and Catbird Seat) and served on the board of Copper Canyon Press for nearly a decade. He founded and operated Campagne and Café Campagne in Seattle until he sold the restaurants in 2005. One of the high spots of Lewis's gastronomic life has been his stints as traveling companion to Jim Harrison, poet, novelist and gourmand. Their forays, dubbed by Harrison a "Search for the Genuine," have taken them from the exquisite pleasures of the most recherché Parisian establishments to those of hidden kitchens throughout la France profonde. Accounts of these lucullan adventures, written by Harrison, have occasionally surfaced--most notoriously in the New Yorker ("A Really Big Lunch," 2004). Now a restaurant consultant, Lewis is also an author: his debut murder mystery, Dead in the Dregs, was published by Counterpoint last month.

On your nightstand now:

When I'm into a restaurant consulting project, as I am now, the nightstand gets a little out of hand:

Muriel Barbery, Gourmet Rhapsody

Jack Gilbert, The Dance Most of All

Denis Johnson, Nobody Move

Neal Rosenthal, Reflections of a Wine Merchant

Mahmoud Darwish, Mural

Michael Steinberger, Au Revoir to All That

Niccolò Ammaniti, As God Commands

Charles Bowden, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing

Boston Teran, God Is a Bullet

Favorite book when you were a child:

It's a race between The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling and Stuart Little by E.B. White. My mother read Kipling to me; Stuart Little was the first "serious" novel I read to myself that conferred an "adult" pleasure.

"And it's Stuart Little, by a whisker!"

Your top five authors:

This is a nearly impossible task. It's like being asked, "What are your top five favorite wines?" (Actually, the wine question would be much easier to answer.)

Mystery: James Crumley, Andrea Camilleri, Paco Ignacio Taibo III, Raymond Chandler, Michael Dibdin

Food & Cooking: Richard Olney, Paula Wolfert, M.F.K. Fisher, Roy Andries de Groot, Elizabeth David

Wine: Gerald Asher, Simon Loftus, Kermit Lynch, Andrew Jefford, Jancis Robinson

Book you've faked reading:

Dante's The Divine Comedy in the six-volume Bollingen edition. Thing is, you wouldn't have known if I hadn't told you. You'd just be impressed, seeing it sitting on my bookshelf. I prefer reading La Commedia in the various translations by poets: W.S. Merwin, Robert Pinsky et al.

Book you are an evangelist for:

Roberto Calasso's Literature and the Gods. Calasso wears his erudition so lightly--his scope of reference is so vast--that his work embodies the simultaneity of all art of which Eliot spoke. I've turned a number of poet friends onto his work. I'm not sure they ever see the world, or their own work, the same way again.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Roald Dahl's Taste in the Redpath Press edition. Then, of course, I read it, and it's a miraculous little story.

Book that changed your life:

Two books, actually, carried in tandem as I wandered the Niger Bend in 1972: Rexroth's 100 Poems from the Chinese and Penguin Modern Poets 9: Denise Levertov/Kenneth Rexroth/William Carlos Williams. They're virtually in tatters now, but they were constant and faithful companions and kept me centered and sane for months in some truly remote precincts. There's a beer label (Flag Spéciale: Société des Brasseries du Niger) still marking "The Red Wheelbarrow" on page 84.

Favorite line from a book:

"The world is so necessary." --from "Postscript," Letters to Yesenin by Jim Harrison.

Book you have re-read:

Moby-Dick

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

Homer's The Odyssey. On a trip through the Aeolian Islands several years ago, it felt as if I was experiencing Odysseus's voyage--the sea, the geography, the gods--through his eyes. Odysseus's eyes. Homer was blind as a bat.

Funke takes readers on a chilling and imaginative adventure enriched by the lore of the Brothers Grimm. Just as 12-year-old Meggie escaped into the Inkworld in Funke's Inkheart, here her protagonist Jacob first enters a Mirrorworld at age 12, via the looking glass in the study of his missing father, John Reckless. Jacob's father had disappeared a year earlier, and when Jacob finds a cryptic note tucked into a book about airplane propulsion, suggesting the mirror is a passageway, he hopes it will lead him to his father. The author suggests a 19th-century European backdrop.

By the second chapter, Jacob is 24, and has been traveling to the Mirrorworld for a dozen years: "Only his love for his brother had made him return to the other world." But now, Jacob's younger brother, Will (a nod to "Wilhelm"), has followed him into the Mirrorworld, and has come under the Dark Fairy's curse: the strike of a Goyl's claw causes Will to show signs of turning into one of them--a man made of stone. As Jacob watches the green stone move up his brother's left forearm, he must try to find an antidote before Will's flesh becomes completely petrified. When Will's girlfriend, Clara, follows him through the mirror, the situation grows even more perilous. The plot thickens when the Dark Witch's dream foretells of a Jade Goyl that could endow her lover, the Goyl king Kami'en, with immortality. Meanwhile, the Goyl wreak such havoc and destruction in Austrey that Therese, the human Empress of Austrey, has agreed to marry her daughter to Kami'en to secure peace.

Funke fills the Mirrorworld with intrigue. As Jacob prepares for his mission, we learn that he's earned a reputation as an expert treasure hunter for the Empress of Austrey, acquiring for her a glass slipper and the golden ball of a princess, among many other prizes. For his quest, he selects from his own treasure chest a handkerchief that produces gold sovereigns, a silver snuffbox, a brass key and a green glass bottle, and he will need them all. He also brings Fox, a woman-vixen shapeshifter whom he'd freed five years earlier and who loves Jacob. The author takes classic Grimm imagery and reinvents it: Jacob first tries to heal Will with berries grown in the garden of a flesh-eating witch (who turns out to be the villain from Hansel and Gretel); they pass through a castle overtaken by thorns (Sleeping Beauty); and a strand of Rapunzel's hair plays a key role in the rescue mission. Jacob must turn to unlikely allies such as a Dwarf who once betrayed him and the Red Witch, sister to the Dark Witch and his one-time lover. For her ambitious storyline, Funke lays out a lot of groundwork here, with a sprawling cast. This first volume comes to a complete resolution but raises plenty of questions to be explored in future installments: Did John Reckless have a relationship with the Goyls at one point? How was he lured into the Mirrorworld, and did he purposely leave a clue for his sons about how to travel there? As the Mirrorworld attracts Jacob to return again and again, so will readers likely be lured back through the looking glass.--Jennifer M. Brown