Boyd Tonkin: Please count me out of the Ross book club

It sounds like some belated April Fool's gag designed to tickle every exposed nerve of anxiety, greed and fashion-victimhood in the palsied frame of the book business. A few days after Richard and Judy are finally disappeared from the badlands of digital TV, Jonathan Ross

announces a book club of his own. Where? On Twitter, where short-winded heirs to Roland Barthes or George Steiner can condense their deathless insights into 140-character critical essays. After a first-week outing for Jon Ronson's psy-ops investigation The Men Who Stare at Goats (alarmingly for authors, a book made briefly available by Pan Macmillan as a free download at the weekend), Wossy promises

Twitter-sized forays into works such as Shalom Auslander's Foreskin's Lament – and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

No, I did not invent that last guest for Ross's narrow online sofa. If you have some 20-word interpretation of America's diffuse democratic epic, prepare to post it now. This makes Monty Python's competition to summarise Proust in 30 seconds seem positively prolix. Inadvertently, perhaps, Ross has staged a surreal car-crash of ideas, formats and platforms. It brings almost to the point of parody the frantic debates about the future of books and reading that have convulsed publishers for several years. The late JG Ballard would have been proud of him.

Book people love to blather on in apocalyptic tones about the impact of new kit on old habits. If I had a pound for every macho discussion about the end of the Gutenberg era I have heard of late, I would certainly be able to afford an Amazon Kindle 2. Except, of course, that I couldn't yet buy it or use this state-of-the-art electronic reader in Europe - for all the boring legal, technical and commercial reasons that will slow this revolution down. How many people have I ever seen immersed in a book on a Sony e-reader, available here since last September? One. Yet many publishers still treat these niche-market slabs of chips with the awestruck reverence accorded to the black monolith in Stanley Kubrick's 2001.

Of course, changes in book formats and delivery devices will accelerate fast – but on a bewildering variety of fronts, from e-books and print-on-demand titles to texts accessed on new-wave mobile phones and other hand-held multi-function gizmos. But there is an intellectual vacuum at the heart of British publishing that no amountof wittering and Twittering about new technology can fill. Forget the gadgets for a spell. We know where the endangered literary species lie: in demanding fiction, in serious non-fiction for general readers rather than a captive academic audience - in all the genres that toil to pay their way but contribute so handsomely to our cultural wealth.

Who will buy these books - off the shelf or online, in print or in pixels - and why will they do so? In non-fiction, British publishers have always looked smart and acted fast in rapid response to momentous events and overwhelming trends: Vince Cable's anatomy of our economic plight, The Storm, has been outselling Jade Goody. They have proved prodigal in giving punters what some surprise smash indicates they seem to want. If a book about 18th century seafaring or scientific atheism unexpectedly tops the charts, rest assured that you will be able to read a dozen like it in a year or two.

At present, they need to act rather than react: to nurture fresh readerships rather than fawn like brainless lackeys on any star presenter who deigns to do the job for them. To be fair, some of the more muscular and far-sighted independent firms - Faber have begun to do just that. It has never been easier, or more absorbing, to pose the "How?" question about reading. Now is the time for "Why?". If it goes unasked or unanswered, then the time when Jonathan Ross could host Walt Whitman on Twitter might even come to feel like a golden age.

P.S.The Lillehammer festival, Norway's foremost annual literary gathering, has been learning how David Irving can spoil even the finest party. This year's programme, heavy with Norwegian stars and international authors from Aravind Adiga to Victoria Hislop, has been overshadowed by a threat of attendance from the inflammatory historian. Irving was branded a Holocaust denier in the High Court in London after his failed bid to sue Penguin Books and his critic Deborah Lipstadt, while his views on Nazi genocide earned him a prison term in Austria in 2006. He was originally invited to speak at this week's festival, which has 'Truth' as its theme. Although he was swiftly disinvited, he vowed to turn up and lecture anyway. Local hotel managers have cancelled bookings for him in fear of demonstrations and a 'battlefield' outside their properties.