Book fair: Rain fails to dampen sales

Book fair: Rain fails to dampen sales
DH News Service,Bangalore:
Heavy rains in Bangalore could not dampen the spirit of book lovers, on the last day of the book fair. A large number of people turned out at Palace Grounds to pick the books of their choice

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The book fair, which started from November 14, ended amid drizzles on Sunday evening. A rough estimate suggests that nearly 1.25 lakh books were sold in the last ten days at 260-odd counters, which had books ranging from spirituality to computers, children’s books to law, history and literature. The most interesting part was that besides books in Kannada, Hindi and English, those in Sanskrit, Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil, Bengali, Oriya, Marathi, Urdu and Gujarati languages were also available in the book fair. In the category of foreign languages, French, Italian, Arabic and Persian books were also on sale.
At the end of the book fair, almost all participating book stores and book houses appeared to be happy with the response.
“The response was tremendous. We did good business, more than expected,” said Umashankar of Vasantha Prakashana. He added thar most of his buyers chose books by Poornachandra Tejasvi and Byrappa.
Suresh from Mumbai, who had a large collection of children’s books, said, “Business was good. Besides children’s books, those on Yoga and home therapy also sold well.” A good number of copies of the Quran were sold. Said Abdulla Burmi, “We have sold around 600 copies of English Quran alone. Most of the buyers were non-Muslims.”
Asked for the possible reasons behind the good sale of Quran in the book fair, Abdulla Burmi said, “There is quest for truth and man is searching for peace. It is the almighty God who can give peace.”
Ramesh, who was selling Telugu Books at the Vishalaandhra Telugu book stall was not quite happy with the response. “There are good number of Telugu-speaking people in Bangalore, but they either do not turn up or select books of their choice. This is not encouraging,” he said