City Beat | Freedom and openness of Hong Kong Book Fair make it an event worth relishing

Week-long offering of quality works draws more than a million visitors and with good reason

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Visitors browsing through books at this year’s fair. Photo: K.Y. Cheng

Published: 2:13pm, 31 Jul 2016Updated: 8:49pm, 31 Jul 2016

Are Hongkongers book lovers?

The annual book fair, which ended last week, drew a total of more than a million visitors, and if you saw all those eager faces waiting in the long queues outside the Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wan Chai on the opening day of the publishing carnival, then dashing in to get first dibs, the answer could be an easy “yes”.

But no one can disagree that the week-long Hong Kong Book Fair, one of the largest in the world, has very much become a commercial event or a summer activity, while publishers treat it as the best venue and opportunity of the year to boost sales and dispose of old stocks.

That helps to explain why organisers every year try to build up a main theme for the fair in order to lure visitors with a “special” attraction, while local publishers and those from overseas specialising in different types of publications have their own agenda.

This year was no exception. While the official theme was Chinese martial arts, kung fu, or wuxia literature, education-related titles and school guides of various types were much sought after by many parents locked in heated discussions on how to help their children “win at the starting point”.

So-called “banned books” and works by well-known political figures were also in demand, this being the first major book fair after the Causeway Bay Bookstore controversy and the Lunar New Year Mong Kok riot, and with the Legislative Council and chief executive elections approaching.