Taipei Book Fair Forced to Go Virtual By Teri Tan | Feb 01, 2021
A new outbreak of Covid-19 cases at a local hospital effectively derailed the planned in-person segment of the 2021 Taipei International Book Fair, which ran from January 26 to 31 under the theme “Reading in the Time of a Pandemic.”
Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture called off the physical fair shortly before it was set to open. The ministry had hoped to use the fair to give the country s domestic publishing and bookselling industries a boost by distributing 200,000 coupons each valued at NT$100 (or $3.47) to all fair visitors. But because of the Covid outbreak, all large-scale public events ahead of the upcoming week-long Chinese New Year holiday have now been canceled. (Thus far, the island has 911 Covid cases and only eight deaths due to Covid-19. But it reported its first Covid-19 death in eight months on Saturday and more than 4,000 people are now under quarantine.)
Rights and licensing are part of the Taipei Book Fair’s Publishers Training Program, produced digitally with Frankfurter Buchmesse.
The collective stand ‘German Stories’ is a regular feature at the Taipei International Book Exhibition, as is Frankfurter Buchmesse’s professional program in publishing. Image: Porter Anderson
Rights, Licensing, and Maximizing Your IP
So successful had Taiwan been in handling the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic that just a week ago, Ralph Jennings was writing at Forbes of how the health minister, Chen Shih-chung, was talking about the possibility of a limited reopening of its borders. This island of just under 24 million had carefully controlled outside access, closing to flights from China and then other parts of world early on in the contagion’s spread in the spring of 2020.