Re:France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon
by mtalantikite on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @08:10PM
(#29008076)
Yeah, we have some decent sized book festivals here in NYC, but they’re still relatively small. Brooklyn Book fest is one of the larger ones in NYC and the attendance number I found is about 35k people. The one in Lyon you mentioned seems to be at around 65k, in a city less than 1/10 the size of NYC.
It’s too bad, book festivals can be a lot of fun. I went to the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2019 and the estimate was 400k people over the 5 days. High school kids were even taking class field trips to hear author talks. It was really nice to see so many people excited for books.
That is, in the US the vision is generally something along the lines of Amazon vs. small independent stores a la "You've Got Mail".
In France, there are big, multi-day book fairs that take up large swaths of major cities. I visited Lyon during the Quais du Polar festival years ago, which is a 3 or 4 day event focused just on the crime fiction genre. I've never experienced anything like that in the US.