The publishing industry now has an answer. It is bringing out new editions of some of the great, often unread, works with a fresh emphasis on 'accessibility'. Some may call it dumbing down. The books will be, well, simpler.

One of the first to receive the treatment is Tolstoy's War and Peace, republished this month by Penguin in a new, reader-friendly translation.

The work of Anthony Briggs, a professor of Russian at Birmingham University who took four and a half years to tackle the original text, the story has been billed by Penguin this time as 'the most melodramatic of soap operas'.

Later this month an even more radical reworking of another important doorstop book is to be launched on the market. Bantam Press is to bring out A Briefer History of Time, a condensed version of the science classic by Stephen Hawking that became an international bestseller - shifting more than ten million copies around the world. Bantam readily admits that 'in the years since its publication, readers have repeatedly told Professor Hawking of their great difficulty in understanding some of the book's most important concepts'.

The author, Bantam claims, now wishes to make its content accessible to readers as well as to update some of the research. The new edition is quite literally 'briefer'. Gone are the purely technical concepts Hawking introduced, such as the mathematics of chaotic boundary conditions, while whole chapters are given over to more popular scientific ideas, such as relativity and quantum theory.

Briggs's version of Tolstoy's epic story of love, passion and politics during the Napoleonic wars is the first major translation for nearly 50 years and, Briggs felt, was long overdue.

'I felt it needed refreshing and renewing,' he said. In translating the book he aimed to keep the reader in mind all the time. 'You should try to recreate for the reader in English an experience that is as similar to that the Russian reader would have had,' he said this weekend.

The original translations have the heroine Natasha looking in the mirror after her devastating illness and saying, 'Can this truly be I?' This is too slavish a translation for Briggs, who renders the same line as 'Can that really be me?'

'When you read one of the older translations you feel as if you are being read to by the Queen or by Lady Antonia Fraser,' said Briggs. 'I am very different to previous translators. I am a man, for a start, from a pragmatic, lower-class, Northern background, and I hope I have made it more readable for today.'

The third hefty book likely to receive the 'accessibility treatment' this autumn is Clarke's novel Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Although the book was a popular hit, its publisher Bloomsbury suspects there are readers out there who were put off by its size. They are planning to produce a triple edition paperback version of the work. The hope is that in digestible gobbets the story will be more approachable - much as Victorian epic novels were often produced in serial form rather than in one volume.

Other classic books which might find themselves repackaged in the future are Moby Dick by Herman Melville, Clarissa by Samuel Richardson, Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon and Underworld by Don DeLillo.

...but if you're really in a hurry

War and Peace

by Leo Tolstoy

The scene is Russia, 150 years before the birth of Roman Abramovich. Noble people, with names that all sound vaguely like Kalashnikov, dance and gossip and do evil things, sometimes all at the same time. Pierre Bezhukov, playboy bastard son of a rich count, rescues Natasha, falls in love, and marries her. Napoleon is meanwhile invading Russia, stupidly marching on Moscow, losing the war, and preparing to watch his army get cut to pieces by Cossacks on their way home.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

by Susanna Clarke

The scene is England (about 150 years before the birth of Roman Abramovich). Mr Norrell is the last magician around, except for Jonathan Strange. Statues speak, a woman turns into a cat (and back again). Strange helped Wellington magic roads into existence and bring dead soldiers back to life. If he hadn't, Jacques Chirac would be in Downing Street.

A brief history of time

by Stephen Hawking

Einstein was a Swiss patent office clerk who got lucky with the equation e=mc2, but I'm smarter - that's called relativity. The universe started with a very big bang and is expanding. But due to the cosmological arrow, this won't last forever. Once the universe starts shrinking, it's probably best not to invest in buy-to-let properties.