Tuesday, February 12, 2008

The 2008 Taipei International Book Exhibition (TIBE 2008), organized by the Taipei Book Fair Foundation (TBFF), will start tomorrow and end next Monday (Feb. 18) at the Taipei World Trade Center in Hall 1 & 3 and in the Taipei Show (TWTC Hall 2). Before the opening of the main show, the TIBE changed significantly.

Since the Preview Exhibition was held in 1992 in Jhonghe City, Taipei County with the “History of books in China” theme, the preview exhibition wasn’t eventually held before the main show every year.

This pre-main-show exhibition style was replaced by a consuming battle between bookstores from actual to virtual (via Internet) and reading festivals from municipal libraries in Taiwan that the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China promoted. But in 2008, after the TBFF was regrouped last year, the preview exhibition finally returned on Feb 2 & 3 with the “Book Market” and “Arts and Crafts” in the Huashan Culture Park, Taipei. With the preview exhibition, the reading population is expected to expand rapidly and widely in Taiwan.

To gather on different cultures, the TBFF not only arranged a variety of seminars from book-cover designing, changes of publishing industry, publishing style, and strategies from global publishing industry, but also invited executives from the publishing industry worldwide such as Michel Le Bris, Gilles Lapouge, Shaun Tan, Markus Zusak, Tony Wheeler, and Maruen Wheeler and executives from the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Apart from seminars and executives, the Stiftung Buchkunst (Book Art Foundation) will showcase several awarded books from “Giant of Japanese Design” and some book design awards in the “Most Beautiful Book Designing” pavilion. Two book design awards by TBEE named the “2008 TIBE Prize” and “2008 Golden Butterfly Award” will be successively announced on Feb 13 & 14.

Not only on book-designing and pavilions, even though Australia was named as the main international pavilion, the TBFF chose the opening movie “What My Eyes Have Seen” from France and a closing movie named “The Edge of Heaven“ from Germany, those selected movies including the opening and closing ones will be screened at the movie pavilion. The Travel Literature Pavilion will show a different style varied from the 2007 Taipei International Travel Fair, not only just about traveling but also mixed with cultures and literature.