Publishers are looking toward more dazzling book designs to survive the shift toward e-book readers, such as Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iPad.

Every page of Shanghai-based magazine editor Sun Junliang's 2002 travelogue Page, for instance, is shaped like an envelope.

The book about his journeys around the globe is one of about 30 books the graphic design graduate of Japan's Musashino Art University has published in the past decade.