Beijing International Book Fair
29 August 2015
I have joined up with a French and a Danish colleague to attend the Beijing book fair (北京书展). All the usual frenetic stuff. Attending meetings, picking up intelligence, making connections – same slightly mad authors wandering around with their life’s work in their day sacks.
This fair has long been on my wish list, and it’s great to see it in action. It feels considerably internationalized. Genuine entrepreneurial activity: lots of ingenious collaboration on creating content across markets and getting it delivered.
Digital is big: scholarly platforms for library subscription, lending libraries in the cloud, content for mobile Internet. Other themes include: translation of Chinese cultural material for foreign markets, ELT/CLT, and selling rights to China. We had little time to even scratch the surface for children’s publishing.
Inspiring and exhausting. I took this afternoon off and had a beer this evening – we head to Hong Kong tomorrow.
Cloud library 
Translation rights 
South entrance