Book fair returning to former glory as youths visit in flocks

Young people, including school and college students, are flocking to the Amar Ekushey Book Fair in huge numbers looking for popular literary works.

Their presence has brought a more festive environment to the fair at Suhrawardy Udyan in Dhaka with booksellers and publishers hoping for a good sale after two years of low visitor turnouts amid the Covid 19 pandemic.

Sellers said increasing numbers of youths are visiting the fair looking for motivational books, romantic books in addition to works of popular writers.

Books by authors, who are popular for their writings in social media are also seeing massive sales.

Visiting the fair with his friends on Wednesday, Safayet Hussain, a college student from Mohammadpur, said they were looking for a medical thriller by Maliha Tabassum whose writing they regularly follow on Facebook. “We will buy the book by contributing money and take turns in reading it.”

Many young readers are buying books in a similar way as Safayet and his friends.

Mohammd Younus, in-charge for the stall of KathaPrakash said that after seeing 10 books students might buy one. “This is normal and it makes us joyous as it indicates the growing number of potential readers we are going to have in future.”

According to the sellers, most school and college students visit the fair from 3pm to 5pm while the university students and jobholders go after 5pm.

According to members of Bangladesh Publishers & Book-Sellers Association, this year’s book fair has seen a better visitor turnout than the last two years. But sales are yet to pick up the pace as it was before the pandemic. Even so, considering only nine days have passed since the fair began, the growth in sales is hopeful.

The annual book fair suffered from various setbacks in 2021 and 2022 due to the prevalence of the coronavirus in the country. The 2022 edition of the fair was held between February 15 to March 28 with strict Covid-19 restrictions in place while the one in 2021 took place from March 18 to April 12.

Sellers said they are expecting sales to gain a huge boost in the coming weekends as their key customers, who buy the major share of books, usually come to the fair after February 10 or 12.

Shamal Paul, convener of the Amar Ekushey Book Fair Standing Committee, said the time to determine whether sale is less this year has not come yet.

He said students and youths are the main customers right now and they are mostly buying motivational books and light literature.

The readers of classic novels, fiction, translated books and also the historical and research books will arrive this weekend or early next week, he hoped.

“After years, we are observing a happy festive environment in the book fair, a huge crowd at the beginning. What we are hoping now is to get back our readers like before,” he added.

According to Bangla Academy, the implementing authority of the book fair, some 641 books and literature works have been published till Wednesday night.