Hong Kong Book Fair： A Carnival for Common People to Read.
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Hong Kong Book Fair: A Carnival for Common People to Read.
The special status of Hong Kong has made the sales characteristics of Hong Kong’s book industry, which can’t be copied by mainland or overseas book industry.
Our reporter/Chen Xiaoping
On July 21st, when Typhoon No.3 "Candu" formed in the South China Sea, the 21st Hong Kong Book Fair, which lasted for one week, kicked off at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center in Victoria Harbour. The coming typhoon has not stopped Hong Kong people’s great enthusiasm for participation. On the overpass leading to the Convention and Exhibition Center in Central Square, Hong Kong people who came to buy books with carts and suitcases jostled each other. Security guards need to take measures to restrict the release, so as to control the flow of people at any time and maintain order.
From the 200,000-person attendance of the first book fair in 1990 to the 920,000-person attendance this year, the annual attendance of the Hong Kong Book Fair has been hitting a new high-today, almost one in every seven Hong Kong people goes to the book fair-although this has made the Hong Kong Book Fair a "fair" for books. The Hong Kong Trade Development Council has made this book business stronger and stronger, and such a lively scene is unmatched by Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu book fairs.
Visit book fairs and buy books once a year.
From the Wan Chai subway station to the Convention and Exhibition Center, there are all kinds of publishers’ advertisements, book exhibition posters and flags. At the entrance to the venue, people have to wait for the people in front to fully enter the exhibition before releasing the next batch of visitors. It is said that the longest time, the queue was one kilometer, and citizens had to wait for more than 40 minutes to enter the venue.
"I really don’t know what supports the enthusiasm of Hong Kong people to visit the book fair," said a Beijing reporter who participated in the Hong Kong book fair for the first time. Seeing such a scene makes people dizzy, and if the goal of buying books is not clear, it is very painful to find a book in the book fair, just like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Including Chinese and English booksellers (bookstores) across the Taiwan Strait and three places, as well as foreign language books from many countries, all publishing houses and bookstores directly enter the venue to set up booths to sell books. Just like the temple fair in Beijing, there are constant shouting and selling in the venue, and there are even booths selling books with banners of "20% off for one book, 30% off for six books and 6.5% off for ten books".
On the 22nd, the second day of the book fair, the storm, accompanied by lightning, did not stop Hong Kong people from buying books at the book fair. From time to time, I see book buyers with suitcases, and most of them are mainstream bestsellers. Teenagers prefer "light novels", while the elderly prefer health books. The so-called "light novel" refers to the combination of novels and cartoons. It is a kind of entertaining literary book, which tells stories with cartoons, pays attention to pictures and has shots, and is mostly imported from Japan.
During the summer vacation, the main force during the day is middle school students, and some "light novels" are even sold in bundles. In the evening, the age of book buyers goes up. After dinner on Friday, office workers become the main force of the book fair. On the weekend, married with children’s parent-child group appears at the book fair, and Hong Kong people enjoy the seven-day book carnival as a holiday.
It has been 21 years since the Hong Kong Book Fair. Visiting the book fair in these seven days has become an annual habit of Hong Kong people. Many young people don’t usually visit bookstores to buy books. They will save a sum of money to buy books at the annual book fair, and even compare with friends.
For this phenomenon, Ma Jiahui, a Hong Kong cultural person, explained: "This is a tragedy in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, there is not even a decent bookstore, and the usual pace of life is very tight. Ordinary people read and buy books less frequently."
Hong Kong people advocate fast food culture, and newspapers and periodicals are the main reading contents of the citizens. Young people in Hong Kong usually don’t like reading, and they are not encouraged to read. They don’t know which bookstore to buy books. Therefore, as Ma Jiahui said, if there is no book fair, young people in Hong Kong may not buy books 365 days a year.
Hong Kong Commercial Press is a publishing house with the largest retail bookstore in Hong Kong. It has 21 bookstores in Hong Kong and Macao, and also has a professional English law bookstore. The annual turnover of the whole bookstore is 600 million Hong Kong dollars. However, in charge of such a leading enterprise in the book industry in Hong Kong, managing director Lu Guo also lamented that the book market was difficult to do. Although the flagship store of Hong Kong Commercial Press in Tsim Sha Tsui is one of the bookstores that mainland scholars like to visit in Hong Kong, the bookstore has suffered the fate of moving three times in five years because of the high rent and the owner’s failure to renew the contract.
Ma Jiahui said that Hong Kong bookstores were all killed by real estate developers.
Readers inside and outside the book fair
In February, 1923, Sun Yat-sen gave a speech at the University of Hong Kong, saying that his thought originated in Hong Kong. But four years later, when Lu Xun went to Hong Kong to give a speech, a group of literary youths complained to Lu Xun that Hong Kong was a "desert area" ideologically, and the statement that Hong Kong was a "cultural desert" was widely spread.
All along, the Hong Kong Trade Development Council has been organizing book fairs with the idea and concept of business management. From asking stars to take the lead in reading and writing books as a marketing tool, to "the second kind of books and periodicals" with pornographic and violent content becoming the focus of the book fair, and then to the invasion of the tender model photo album into the book fair, which also makes the negative news about the book fair continue every year, and the book fair also expands constantly every year, with the increase of exhibition halls, booths and sales figures of books.
In 2005, Fred Lam, the new president of the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, proposed that the Hong Kong Book Fair should pay equal attention to culture and commerce. Fred Lam suggested that the TDC is a commercial organization, not a cultural organization, and it is not good at doing cultural things. "We should find excellent cultural institutions and groups in Hong Kong to do this.". Later, they hired the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Ming Pao Group, Asia Weekly and other cultural organizations as staff officers, and finally decided to cooperate with Asia Weekly to invite writers and cultural celebrities from three places across the Taiwan Straits to give lectures at the book fair.
This year’s book fair also opened the "Hong Kong Writers’ Tour 2010" exhibition area for the first time to promote outstanding local writers in Hong Kong, and followed the example of Frankfurt Book Fair to join the works recitation.
This year’s book fair invited more than 90 writers to participate in more than 270 cultural and outreach activities. Among them, invited lecturers from the Mainland include Feng Jicai, He Weifang, Pan Shiyi, Zhang Yihe and Han Han. In addition, the speakers of the "Famous Lectures" include Zhou Guangqian, Ge Liang and Lin Peili from Hongkong, Chen Wenxi, Liu Kexiang, Lan Bozhou and Tang Nuo from Taiwan Province, jade y. chen living in Germany and Du Weiming from the United States.
In a lecture hall with less than 200 people, Liang Wendao, a Hong Kong writer, is sharing his creative experience with readers. The audience included old people with white hair, peers from Liang Wendao, and more young people, many of whom came from Guangdong to attend the Hong Kong Book Fair.
A local young man in Hong Kong, wearing glasses, T-shirt shorts and a pair of straw flip-flops on his feet, listened carefully and took notes on a single piece of paper. It can be seen that young people like Liang Wendao very much, and listen to the lectures carefully.
Liang Wendao said that the characteristic of Hong Kong writers is to do their own things silently and write their own books. It seems that the readers in Hong Kong are the same.
But more readers are actually outside the book fair. "I haven’t been to the book fair for a long time. My writing doesn’t need to deal with modern people, but is related to the dead." On the other end of the phone, Huang Canran, a Hong Kong poet and translator, told China Newsweek. He goes to work at five o’clock every afternoon and writes in the early hours of the morning. For him, in this busy morning, the day has just ended.
In Hongkong, there is also a group of English-reading people. No one has counted the size of this group, but Ma Jiahui told a story: once he made an appointment for a book review and introduced the Chinese version of Said’s books on music. Later, his friend in the Hong Kong Commercial Press told him that the bookstore kept the original English version of the book for one year and hardly sold a few copies. However, after the book review, the original English version sold 20 copies within a week, while the Chinese translation only sold a few more.
Hong Kong books export to domestic market.
Since 2003, when the mainland opened free travel for tourists to visit Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Book Fair began to welcome mainland readers. Subsequently, the Hong Kong Book Fair set up a "visiting channel", through which you can get preferential ticket purchase. Through these measures, the organizers attract mainland readers to buy books in Hong Kong. According to the statistics of the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, the number of people who entered the 20th Hong Kong Book Fair through the "visiting channel" reached 10,000 last year, and the organizers thought that a considerable number of mainland tourists should follow Hong Kong friends or queue up for admission. In fact, the number of people from the mainland who went to the Hong Kong Book Fair was far more than that.
"Export to domestic market" is one of the characteristics of Hong Kong books. Most of the authors of Chinese works in Hong Kong, especially academic works, come from mainland scholars, and these academic works have returned to the mainland, which has formed a big market, except for local and overseas research institutions. Scholars’ "export" and works’ "domestic sales" are an intriguing structure of the Hong Kong book market.
The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, which has published the works of mainland scholars such as How the Red Sun Rises: The ins and outs of Yan ‘an Rectification Movement by Gao Hua, a professor of history at Nanjing University, and Xu Qingquan, deputy editor-in-chief of Yanhuang Chunqiu, the case of Ding Ling and Chen Qixia’s "anti-Party clique", has gathered a group of excellent mainland scholars’ resources. This university publishing house, which aims at "promoting Chinese and Western cultures and spreading ancient and modern knowledge", is a non-profit academic publishing institution. In the past 30 years, it has published a large number of academic works in both Chinese and English, with authors ranging from Qian Mu and Xu Zhongyue to William Theodore de Bary and Needham. Its topics span from traditional China culture to contemporary China studies, and it has established a stable global sales channel.
Gan Qi, president of The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, told China Newsweek that the press followed the anonymous review system of western university press, and the manuscripts of academic works provided by scholars all over the world must be anonymously reviewed by at least two experts in the industry and submitted to the Academic Books Editorial Committee for final approval before they can be accepted for publication or published after being revised by the author. The editorial department, reviewers and academic committees are integrated to ensure that the manuscript has new ideas or new materials, and in short, it has promoted and contributed on the basis of research in the same field. It is under the guarantee of this system that the publications of this society can maintain the content quality and diversified positions for a long time, which has stimulated the academic thoughts in the mainland.
The booths of The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, Hong Kong Oxford University Press, Hong Kong Commercial Press and Hong Kong Sanlian Bookstore are still the favorite bookstall for mainland readers. ★