The 23rd Thailand National Book Expo, in parallel with the Thailand Children’s Book Festival, is underway in Bangkok. The event began yesterday, Oct 17 and runs twelve days until Oct 28.
Visitor numbers are expected to run into the “hundreds of thousands.” I’ll try get clarification of whether that means “just” 200k or up to 900k, but even if at the lowest end that’s not bad going for a book event in a country where, so they say, nobody reads.
For comparison the just finished Frankfurt Book Fair pulled in a crowd of 280,000.
Earlier this year the Bangkok International Book Fair had its annual run. Just shy of 2 million turned out for that, and in the course of eleven days bought $16 million worth of books,
In case you were wondering that means just short of $1.5 million was being spent on books every day.
At a book fair in Thailand.
And yes, that’s the same Thailand that Big Bad Wolf took 3 million English-language books to in August.
The global book market. No matter how big you think it is, it’s still bigger.
