Paris, August 24 {No.2000-72} - Within Nations and Beyond: The Place of the Book is the theme of an international symposium organised by UNESCO from August 28 to 30 at the Brazilian Academy of Letters in Rio de Janeiro with funding from the Brazilian Foundation Bibilioteca Nacional and the participation of authors Paulo Coelho, Carlos Heitor Cony, Lygia Fagundes Telles, Nélida Piñon and Ziraldo, as well as lecturers from about twelve different countries.

The symposium will bring together the members of the Pathways into the Third Millennium Steering Committee, chaired by Eduardo Portella (Brazil). Subjects such as Locating the book on the building site of culture; Who are the new literates of the network society?; The book in the dialogue of cultures in a global era: from relations of production to production of relations will be addressed through lectures followed by a debate and the testimony of a writer.

The written form is undergoing profound changes, most recently through the possibility of practically instantaneous dissemination of the written word as provided by the new information and communication technologies. But these developments are raising many questions: What will become of the book in the electronic age? Is there an opposition between e-books and real books? Does the book still play a central role in cultural construction? Do the new technologies hold the seeds of the book of the future which should, at long last, enable the different cultures to communicate and understand one another? These questions, which will be addressed by the symposium, are already tackled in Mr Portella's book Chemins de la pensée: vers de nouveaux langages (recently published in French and soon to be published in Spanish and English by UNESCO Publishing).