With more than 30,000 professional visitors, LBF’s exhibition grounds have been crowded like rarely before, also because exhibition space was compressed again this year due to the ongoing renovation works on more than one third of Olympia’s exhibition premises. Similar to last year, the number of booths were limited to 1,010 exhibitors, as compared to the 1,500 of pre-pandemic times. Conversely, the around 600 tables at the International Rights Centre, has been higher than ever – almost 100 tables had to be added at the passageways of the galleries outside the two large auditorium rooms reserved for the IRC.
Most significantly, however, was the sharp drop in the number of Indian exhibitors. Usually a cluster of between 30 and 50 companies with a majority being publishers, this year’s Indian exhibitors consisted of merely two or three publishers exhibiting with their UK affiliates, in addition to one distributor (CBS), five printing houses (Multivista, Navkar, Nutech, Replika, and Thomson), and seven digital service providers (Aptara, Integra, KGL, Kitaboo, Manipal, Newgen, and Transforma).
Over the past few years, printers and service providers have occupied more and more space at LBF, in particular from China, India, Korea, Turkey and the Middle East. And publishers are increasingly resorting to hiring IRC tables instead of entire booths including some of the largest. Quite a few printing houses are taking this route as well. After all, the main business at LBF is the licensing trade and most of the participants attend the fair for sourcing, buying and selling publishing, translation, cross-media and distribution rights, or for offering various services to the book industry.
Increasingly, rights trading at the fair is geared at the films and audiovisual industries based on scripts derived from published books. The number of audiobook titles also keeps rising. Books for children, young adults and what has lately been branded as ‘new adults’ are the segments in vogue in the book industry. According to Nielsen’s industry data for the past two or three years, non-fiction and even ‘quasi-academic’ categories have been more popular than fiction with young adults.
Invited at the book fair to give a talk on ‘Publishing responsibility in times of conflict,’ Palestinian bookseller Mahmoud Muna couldn’t make it to the UK, because his bookshop, the Educational Bookshop in East Jerusalem, had just been raided by Israeli police for the second time in a month’s time. He and his brother and bookshop co-owner Imad had been arrested, before being released.
Mahmoud, his nephew, and another co-owner Ahmad had already been arrested in February. Dozens of books were confiscated in the two raids. The Educational Bookshop sells books that are imported and therefore pass inspection by Israel’s authorities. It specializes in Arabic and English-language books on Jerusalem’s history and the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The booksellers were initially charged with “inciting and supporting terrorism,” but their attorney said this was changed to “disturbing the public order” while they were interrogated. In a message released at LBF, Index on Censorship trustee Andrew Franklin commented, “It is unbearable that people are being arrested simply for selling books. Freedom of speech is under threat everywhere, nowhere more so than in Israel.”
The next LBF has been planned for March 10-12, 2026.
