At the 2023 edition of the Taipei International Book Exhibition. Image: Publishing Perspectives, Porter Anderson
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
See also:
Marketing in ‘Tandem’: Naomi Bacon and Taipei’s Publishers
Interview: Taipei International Book Fair’s Isabella Wu
Taipei International Book Exhibition Opens Its 31st Edition
Some 505,000 Attend Taipei International Book Exhibition
In Taiwan, the 31st Taipei International Book Exhibition has just provided us with facts and figures for its 2023 return to a fully physical show with its “Multiverse of Reading” theme.
In many ways, this public-facing fair has roared back this year, attracting 505,000 attendees in its six-day run.
- Some 3,500 of those 505,000 attendees were students and their teachers, who arrived in 130 school groups.
- There were 470 exhibitors at the Taipei World Trade Centre’s Hall 1 on Xinyi Road, and they represented 33 nations and book markets.
- What’s particularly interesting about the total of some 500 exhibitors is that they were very nearly evenly split–245 of them domestic, 225 of them international, a testament to the Taiwan market’s cultivation of this island book industry’s cultivation of its overseas colleagues. Of course, this is something familiar to October’s trade visitors at Frankfurter Buchmesse where Taiwan had three stands in place.
- The exhibition area allotted to this year’s the program comprised a spacious 23,450 square meters this year, with 1,393 stands in place.
- Among 432 international visitors–including the Guest of Honor Poland delegation–there were 23 international news-media representatives as well as book industry professionals, authors, and illustrators.
During the course of the week, two sequences of professional programming were in operation.
One was produced by the Taiwan Creative Content Agency program–with which Publishing Perspectives readers have been familiar since its 2020 development. And the other was produced by Frankfurter Buchmesse‘s ongoing program of international publisher training and support, this time led by Claudia Kaiser and Katherina Rapp.
We’ll have more in our upcoming Rights Edition from TAICCA’s programming.
Specialized areas of exhibition this year included an “international zone”; a “literary publishers’ zone”; an independent publishers’ and NGOs’ zone; an area for international book importers, wholesalers, and book agents; a digital publishing zone; an area for anime, manga, and light novels; a children’s book zone; and an area for learning and educational toys.
Today, in a separate story, we look at part of the social-media focus in Thursday’s (February 2) focus on social media, a major segment of Frankfurt’s programming, which was titled “How To Thrive in Times of Crisis.”
In this case, the program offered an eye-opening update on a new company in book marketing, one that has developed a formula for social-media book-marketing campaigns that actually flourishes amid relatively new demands for “authenticity” in leveraging various social media for book sales and readership cultivation.
More from us on Taiwan and its market is here, and more on the Taipei International Book Exhibition is here. More from us on international trade shows and book fairs is here.
About the Author
