HYDERABAD: The year end brought for Hyderabadis the joy of stacks of books to get lost in. Despite the barrier of cash crunch having dug holes into their pockets, numbers of book lovers from across the state made it to their awaited yearly book fair at the NTR Stadium.
Many school children led by their teachers shared their feeling. “There are so many books for us to buy here. We can gain so much knowledge if we can own these many.
Be it books in Telugu or course books in Biology, Maths, Science or even story books, we have much more than what my friends and I had expected here,” Babli Pandey from Mahabodhi Group Vidyalaya said.
Manoj Kumar, a freelancer going through the epilogue of a fiction novel said that so far he has not found a great collection for English books here.
“However, I am yet to visit a few more stalls. I expect I find more of what I am looking for. Books mean a lot of to me. Despite, Flipkart and Amazon being there, I make sure I visit the fair every year,” further shared Kumar.
Another visitor Amrita who hails from Visakhapatnam said that she didn’t really find many books on philosophy in English but only too many average fiction novels and books on business. A few prominent stalls were from Bala Sahitya Parishad, National Book Trust (NBT), BRAOU, Arihant and Topudu Bandi.
Some most commonly available books at the fair are volumes of Ramayana, Mahabharata, Bhagat Singh: The Eternal Rebel, Mother by Maxim Gorky, Communist Manifesto and books by renowned German writer Franz Kafka.
“Apart from local ad state-level publishing houses, the 12-day national book fair this year sees the participation of publishers from other cities. Internationally known publishers like Cambridge, Harper Collins and Oxford have also put up their stalls,” K Chandramohan, secretary of Hyderabad Book Fair Society said.
According to the fair organisers, the rent for stall for books in English at the fair was `20,000, whereas those for Telugu, Hindi, Urdu or Tamil books was `9,000.
Every stall allowed the customers to pay via Paytm and debit or credit cards. BRAOU and NBT were among the few stalls which accepted payments only in cash.
On the basis of conversation with the fair stall keepers, it was found that except big publishing houses like Oxford, Cambridge, Nava Telangana, Navodaya and Milind Prakashan, most of the stalls suffered around 40-60 per cent loss in sales of books against previous year due to demonetisation.