This year’s Taipei International Book Exhibition drew 580,000 visitors during its six-day run that ended on Sunday, a 10 percent increase from last year, said the Taipei Book Fair Foundation, which organized the event.
On Saturday alone, 160,000 people swarmed into the Taipei World Trade Center, the most visitors to the event on a single day in the past few years, foundation chairman Chao Cheng-ming (趙政岷) said, adding that it was just one of the positive results of this year’s book show.
Other positive results included a 7 percent growth in the number of publishers that participated in the fair, a 13 percent rise in the number of participating foreign publishers and a 27 percent increase in the number of meetings held to discuss copyright authorization, he said.
There were also 1,184 workshops through which authors met and interacted with their fans, Chao said, but added that the biggest achievement might have been attracting “young people to the book exhibition.”
Those were all “unusual achievements” in an era when the publishing industry is struggling, he said.
A total of 735 publishers from 52 nations participated in the fair, with Germany the featured country this year, the foundation said.
Ministry of Culture Secretary-General Chen Teng-chin (陳登欽) thanked Germany for its participation, which he said enabled Taiwanese to learn about Germans’ fondness for reading and the importance they place on freedom of the press.
The ministry sponsors the event, the largest book fair in the nation.
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