SHANGHAI — From introducing cutting-edge AI tools to showcasing cultural products and interactive activities such as stamp hunting, this year’s Shanghai Book Fair showed how publishers are diversifying their offerings to meet the evolving demands of readers and the wider market.
The fair, which ended on Tuesday and is now in its 20th year, attracted nearly 400,000 visitors to the Shanghai Exhibition Center, where more than 160,000 titles from 360 publishers were on display. This year’s event also featured over 1,000 online and offline activities, underscoring its growing importance in the city’s cultural calendar and the publishing industry’s efforts to reach a wider audience.
A trend towards greater diversity was evident at the book fair, with many publishers expanding their offerings to include a wider range of cultural and creative products. As a result, the number of self-developed items has skyrocketed, leading to an expansion of the exhibition areas for these products.
In addition, many publishers introduced interactive activities, including stamp collecting. This year’s fair offered nearly 600 stamps for collecting, from limited edition designs featuring Shanghai Book Fair motifs to stamps with vintage elements and historical cultural themes.
“I came to the book fair specifically to collect stamps,” said 22-year-old Liu Jiaqi from Shanghai, showing Sixth Tone her notebook full of samples from various publishers. Some of them could be obtained by scanning QR codes, others had to be purchased.
Liu spent nearly 500 yuan ($70) at the fair, but found it was worth it. “Most of the books I bought were 50 percent off, and many of them are hard to find in regular bookstores,” she said.
In 2024, commonly considered the “year of AI application,” Shanghai-based Century Publishing Group – one of the city’s largest publishers – unveiled a series of innovations in three key areas: technical books, traditional culture and educational publications.
Highlights included a newly developed “Writing Assistant,” a plug-in compatible with Microsoft Word and WPS that offers features such as definition search, literary text search, and semantic search.
“Search results are taken exclusively from authoritative reference works, effectively avoiding the ‘hallucinations’ often associated with large language models,” Liu Yinchun, a representative of the Century Publishing Group, told Sixth Tone at the book fair. “This ensures the accuracy and reliability of the information provided.”
In the Digital Publishing Pavilion, the group also showcased its Open Data Platform, which uses content from 200 authoritative reference works and is linked to over 50 Internet applications. This platform includes a “tap-to-screen word search” feature that instantly displays word meanings.
“This was my biggest gain from this book fair,” 40-year-old Zhou Youren told Sixth Tone, referring to the new word search function. He said it could meet his need for word search while reading and writing, which prompted him to immediately sign up as a member.
Zhou has visited the book fair every year for the past two decades. Each visit, he said, brings new discoveries and surprises. “The true magic of the book fair lies in the unexpected encounters with books that you might not otherwise come across. It is a place where stories and ideas come together and offers readers a unique opportunity to explore new worlds and perspectives.”
(Header image: Crowds at the 2024 Shanghai Book Fair, August 20, 2024. Wu Huiyuan/Sixth Tone)
