In e-reading era, Lucknowites take to books in a big way
LUCKNOW: Book lovers in Lucknow have grown manifold in the last decade, making the National Book Fair being held here better, bigger and a big challenge to the Kolkata version of the fair, considered the biggest and most popular in the country.
Interestingly, the city’s youth is taking to reading like never before, pushing up sales and thus attracting publishers from various parts of the country in hordes, so much so that this year some had to be denied permission due to shortage of space.
Starting with 45 publishers and a sale of R 52 lakh in 2003, the Lucknow fair, in its 11th edition, has grown to about 100 publishers with sales expected to reach about R 4 crore. Manoj Chandel, organising secretary of the fair, said, “Last year the book fair sales were about R 3 crore. This year we expect it to rise to somewhere near R 4 crore.”
“The last Kolkata book fair that is one of the biggest fairs of south-east Asia, had sales of about R 18 crore in the 15-day affair. Comparatively, the Lucknow fair, which is much smaller in size and investment, made a decent
R 3 crore last year in just 10 days,” said Chandel.
It was heartening to note that the fad for books has grown so much here that people don’t mind picking up expensive ones that cost even above R 10,000.
“People are also getting advance booking done for their book of choice. These include books on designing, interiors, health etc,” said Chandel.
The organisers recalled that when they conceptualised the book fair and held a meeting with booksellers on the market here, a majority of them did not give an encouraging response to the idea, saying that it would fail to draw buyers.
But, the fears turned out to be false and the sales have gone up year after year, each time ensuring new attractions to the fair. Now it is among the top five book fairs in India, both in terms of sales and publishers’ participation.
“Last year we had promised that we would get some foreign publishers. Thus we have a publisher from Mauritius this year putting up a stall. Publishers from Pakistan were also to come, but they could not due to some visa problems,” said Chandel. Elated with the response on the very first day of the fair on Friday, the organisers promised that there would be more foreign publishers and a wider collection on regional languages next year.