So in the afternoon today, we loaded all our stuff into 2 auto rickshaws and headed to Palace Ground to claim what was rightfully ours – a 9’x9′ stall in Bangalore Book Festival. Everything went on well – it rained a little, just enough to make us feel good but not enough to spoil the books, autowaalahs didn’t bargain with us to death and organizers were nice enough to have all arrangements in place. We set up the basic stall quickly, made a list of things to get tomorrow and then took a stroll to get some inside scoop before the official thing starts. So what did we find?
So first thing we discovered was that “Books For Change” has a stall right next to us. They hadn’t set it up yet but we hope to catch up with Rajan tomorrow. Then we headed to the lane where Flipkart.com and Pratham Books have their stalls. On the Flipkart stall, we were surprised to find no books but a lot of computers and a wall full of book covers. Looks awesome! We came home to read about this on the flipkart blog. We also stumbled across the stall of Librarywala, an online book rental startup originally based out of Mumbai and now operating in Bangalore too.
It is great to see some online startups participating in the festival this year. Last year we did launch a few books during the festival, however there was not a single online book related service with a stall in the main exhibit area. Given that Bangalore is considered a hub of technology and startups, I found it disappointing. But this year, at least 3 such companies, may be more, are participating. This is encouraging. With Kindle finally making its way to India, perhaps e-books will also feature in one or more stalls of the fest. We will find that out starting from tomorrow.
What’s up tomorrow?
- Book Festival kick starts at 10:30am
- We will have Rajendra Nargundkar, author of “My Experiments with Half-Truths” at the stall from 2pm to 4pm, interacting with readers and signing the books.