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.