Yesterday, I visited the International Book Festival at Millenearis in Budapest. The festival is big enough to be held in several huge buildings, and in the park in front of them. Nowadays, it is quite commonplace to say that 'people have given up on reading completely'. There might be times when you even start to believe this, but this is obviously an over-generalization.
I saw huge crowds at Millenearis wanting to buy books, and people who were queueing to get signatures from the authors who were present. So there is still hope.
I also saw some ebook readers on sale and there were also a few publishers who started selling the electronic versions of some their books. This is a huge development here. I guess we will see much more of this later.
Not much of the contemporary genre writing gets published in Hungarian, but there are now also some big developments on this field, too. Even those who only read books in their mother-tongue can now buy some new and intriguing speculative fiction including The Quantum Thief, Deathless, Zoo City and The Wind-up Girl.
I also spent some money on books (by S. Fry, M. Atwood, Henning Mankell and Wolf Haas), and I even bumped into some writer friends and acqaintances.
I saw huge crowds at Millenearis wanting to buy books, and people who were queueing to get signatures from the authors who were present. So there is still hope.
I also saw some ebook readers on sale and there were also a few publishers who started selling the electronic versions of some their books. This is a huge development here. I guess we will see much more of this later.
Not much of the contemporary genre writing gets published in Hungarian, but there are now also some big developments on this field, too. Even those who only read books in their mother-tongue can now buy some new and intriguing speculative fiction including The Quantum Thief, Deathless, Zoo City and The Wind-up Girl.
I also spent some money on books (by S. Fry, M. Atwood, Henning Mankell and Wolf Haas), and I even bumped into some writer friends and acqaintances.