Chennai: With 5 lakh titles to choose from, the much-awaited 41st Chennai book fair is all set to kickstart on January 10 at Saint George Anglo-Indian higher secondary school.
The 13-day festival, which will draw ardent readers from all over the state, is organised by the Booksellers’ and Publishers’ Association of South India (Bapasi) would have 708 stalls, of which 234 stalls would sell English books.
“This year the book fair will focus on children's books as it is our duty to pass on the reading habit to the next generation. We will conduct, an awareness programme to encourage reading among the school children on January 8,” Bapasi president S. Vairavan said.
Vairavan also added that the as many as 376 publishers, including 102 English publishers would take part in the fair.
"We recorded a footfall of 10 lakh readers last year and expecting a footfall of 13 lakh readers this year. Books in over 5 lakh titles will be available in the fair and more than 10,000 new releases will come this year," he added.
The organisers also said that entrance ticket would be sold at Rs 10. However, to encourage the school students to visit the fair, Bapasi had distributed 5 lakh free tickets to the schools
“Prominent writers of Tamil and English will be felicitated at the event. We also arranged special oratory events on the sidelines of the book fair where eminent personalities and IAS officers will deliver their speech,” Vairavan said.
The book fair will be open to the public from 11 am to 9 pm on weekends and holidays and 2 pm to 9 pm on weekdays.
Tamil Nadu school education minister K.A. Sengottyan will inaugurate the fair on January 10.
Robot to guide readers
Jumping on the technology bandwagon, Bapasi has roped in a talking robot to guide readers inside the book fair hall.
The 'Bhavishya', an Android and cloud-based robot would help the readers to find books. "The robot is equipped with speech recognition technology and readers can ask 'her' to guide," Robotix lab research academy team, who gifted the robot to the book fair, said. Though the hardware parts of the robot have been imported from
China, all software-oriented operations are programmed indigenously the team claimed. "Now Bhavishya will only understand and reply in English only, we are trying to make her speak in Tamil too," P. Vijayashree, head of the team said.
