Here’s the thing: you don’t have to be a print book person or an e-book person. It’s not an either/or proposition. You can choose to have your text delivered on paper with a pretty cover, or you can choose to have it delivered over the air to your sleek little device. You can even play it way loose and read in both formats!Crazy, right? To have choice. Neither is better or worse — for you, for the economy, for the sake of “responsible self-government.” We should worry less about how people get their books and — say it with me now! — just be glad that people are reading.

It is a literary innovation that will delight London’s influx of Russians – and intrigue the intelligence services. Waterstones will open a Russian-language “bookshop” within its flagship Piccadilly store next month.

Russian-speaking assistants will be recruited for the shop, which is the personal passion of Alexander Mamut, the Russian billionaire whose A&NN Group bought the high-street bookseller last year in a £53m deal.

“Genitals,” Malcolm Bradbury, the British novelist and academic, wrote, “are a great distraction to scholarship.” They’ve been a distraction, too, to our understanding of the Kama Sutra, the classic study of society and sexuality written in India nearly 2,000 years ago.

The book resides in the popular imagination as kitsch, as if it were a series of aroused and arousing Pilatesposes for two. In bookstores you will find inanities like “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Supercharged Kama Sutra Illustrated” sooner than a faithful translation of the original manuscript, which contained no drawings whatsoever.

This clear and elegant new translation is the work of A. N. D. Haksar, a former Indian diplomat and a well-known translator of Sanskrit classics. It’s worth attending to, and not merely because Valentine’s Day is nearly here, and your partner might find this sleek new Penguin Classics edition an intellectual aphrodisiac, though it contains no erotic illustrations, except several sublime ones on its cover. (For a certain audience, all Penguin Classics are trance-inducing objects of lust.)

Once solemn, hushed repositories, libraries are poised to make themselves more vibrant centers. It will take an imaginative rethinking of what a library is and how it works, but, as the sleepover example makes clear, there has never been a shortage of imagination at the public library.

You probably did not realize that the official legal position of Marvel is that contrary to the general thematic content of the Marvel Universe, mutants are not people. A recent Radiolab podcast brings the shocking true story, but it’s easy enough to summarize: Marvel-licensed action figures are generally made abroad and imported into the United States. But “dolls” (which are representations of people) face a higher import duty than “toys” (which are representations of non-humans), so it’s in the interests of Marvel to argue that X-Men action figures should be taxed at the low non-tarrif rate.