Book Fair - 20090814

Have not been to book fair in Hong Kong for years.

I love reading, and like to hang around in book stores to skim books, even for a whole afternoon. Sadly, the atmosphere of book fair is just suffocating here in the "Pearl of Orient".

The major problem is, the organizer, TDC, treats book fair, together with any other exhibition, say food fair, with the same mentality in the same manner. By setting up numerous booths plus an enclosed area for seminar, bureaucracy prevails round-the-clock in the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre without prejudice to the type of products under promo. And once I could connect book to food, my appetite is lost.

The ambiance of book fair is also weird. Frankly, I do not come across many readers in daily life. We Hong Kongers are too busy to squeeze out the invaluable time to read, by forfeiting the opportunity to jump into the "stock sea". Strangely, during the book fair, all of us are happy to bustle in it and thus, the attendance is predestined to be broken in every new occasion.

Though the attendance must be record-breaking, the thought of most of us is the same - to earn back the money spent in the tickets! And book fair has become, more or less, the Mecca to Hong Kongers, but the purpose of going could be anything but spiritual. The situation could be compared with travelling, below dialogue could easily be overheard in any office -

A: "Where have you been in the holiday?"

B: "O, just Kyoto"

A: "I've been there too, good!"

B: "Yea!"

. . .

The same dialogue could be repeated by replacing "Kyoto" with "Book Fair". I choose not to be assimilated in every possible chance.