What to read? Flood of books expected this fall

The Borders chain is going out of business, shutting down hundreds of stores, and millions more e-book devices have been sold. Some publishers say e-books are now 20 per cent of overall sales or higher, more than double from 2010. Even J.K. Rowling has gone digital, and will soon offer e-editions of the Harry Potter books through her Pottermore website.

But the season's biggest selling title may be available only the old-fashioned way.

The Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever, the seventh of Jeff Kinney's series about the trials of schoolboy Greg Heffley, arrives in November with an announced first printing of over six million copies and, so far, no plans for an e-book.

The print run is greater than the combined totals for two other likely blockbusters: Rick Riordan's Heroes of Olympus (three million copies) and Christopher Paolini's Inheritance (2.5 million), the fourth and final book of his Inheritance fantasy cycle. The Wimpy Kid series has more than 45 million copies in print and the new book has already reached the top 20 on Amazon.com. Independent sellers say customers have been pre-ordering Cabin Fever for months.

"Those books fly off the shelves like candy," says Becky Anderson, co-owner of the two Illinois-based Anderson's Bookshops.

"It's great to see kids open the new books and immediately start laughing."

The e-revolution so far has been more for the old than for the young.

Officials at Rowling's American publisher, Scholastic Inc, and Kinney's publisher, Abrams Books, both say e-sales for children's titles are five per cent or less of the total market, with at least some of those purchases by adults who like The Hunger Games and other works popular with kids.

Glassman, who cites parents' reluctance to let kids handle e-readers, says his business has been far more affected by physical books being purchased online than by electronic books.

Big sales are expected for several children's releases, including Maurice Sendak's Bumble-Ardy, the first book he has written and illustrated in decades, and the first two instalments from a new 39 Clues series. Brian Selznick has a new novel, Wonderstruck, and his award-winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret has been adapted into a Martin Scorsese film due just before Thanksgiving. Author-film-maker William Joyce starts his new Guardians of Childhood series with The Man in the Moon.

Even Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and atheist who wrote the million-selling The God Delusion, has completed a book for young people.

For adult readers, booksellers say literary fiction looks especially strong, including two major debuts: Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus and Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding.

Novels are also coming from Haruki Murakami, Michael Ondaatje, Roberto Bolano, Charles Frazier, William Kennedy, Russell Banks and Umberto Eco. Nine stories by Don DeLillo have been compiled for The Angel Esmeralda.

Chris Schluep, senior editor of books at Amazon.com, is looking forward to Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot, his first novel since the Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex. A literary story about three well-read Ivy League seniors, The Marriage Plot is set mostly at Brown University, Eugenides' alma mater, and features a student who shares the author's Greek heritage.

prolific

New work is expected from John Grisham, Patricia Cornwell, Lee Child, Michael Connelly and the prolific James Patterson, an author for all seasons. A trio of crime novels builds on past work: Anthony Horowitz's The House of Silk, an authorised Sherlock Holmes mystery; Robert B. Parker's Killing the Blues, completed by Michael Brandman after Parker died last year; and the late Mickey Spillane's The Consummata, finished by Max Allan Collins, a close friend.

Paolo Coelho, one of the world's best-selling authors, has a new novel of physical and spiritual travel, The Aleph.

Two books will reveal the private thoughts of elusive public figures. Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs is the first authorised biography of the Apple leader who just announced that he was stepping down as CEO. Jacqueline Kennedy features interviews with the former first lady taped soon after her husband's assassination.

Stephen King's 11/22/63 is a time-travel fantasy about a mission to save JFK.

Joan Didion follows her classic study of grief for her husband, John Gregory Dunne, The Year of Magical Thinking, with Blue Nights, a memoir about ageing and the death of daughter Quintana Roo. Film critic and cancer survivor Roger Ebert takes on real life, his own, in Life Itself. Diane Keaton remembers her mother in Then Again. Harry Belafonte's My Song includes an intimate portrait of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

Some works are hard to categorise, even by the authors. Dava Sobel's A More Perfect Heaven might be called a dramatic biography. It's a review of the life of the astronomer Copernicus in which a conventional narrative is wrapped around an original play by the author. Ann Beattie, known for her minimalist short stories, has written Mrs Nixon. The subject is Richard Nixon's wife, Pat Nixon, but it's not a biography, a work of fiction or creative non-fiction.

politics

The fall will be relatively light on politics and presidents, although a pair of books will come from two of the highest officials in the George W. Bush administration: Dick Cheney's In My Time, the most anticipated memoir from a former vice-president in decades, and Condoleezza Rice's No Higher Honor, which covers her years as national security adviser and secretary of state.

In Tension City, newsman Jim Lehrer reflects on presidential debates - some of which he moderated - from Kennedy-Nixon to Obama-McCain. Another book may revive interest in a president who hardly had the chance to serve. James Garfield, elected in 1880 and fatally wounded just months later, is the subject of Candace Millard's Destiny of the Republic.

Music memoirs are coming from Pearl Jam, Jermaine Jackson, Kenny Rogers and R. Kelly. Madonna fans might be interested in at least two books: Le Freak, by Like a Virgin producer Nile Rodgers (they were just good friends, he writes), and I Want My MTV, an oral history that has Madonna's picture on the cover and an entire chapter on her rise to video superstar, but no comments from the singer herself.

Judy Collins has written Sweet Judy Blue Eyes.