The in-person professional visitor count at Bologna Children’s Book Fair 2023 jumped by 35 percent over 2022, organizers say.
With Bologna Children’s Book Fair having closed Thursday, we have numbers today that reflect the very big crowds at the 60th edition of its operation.
Organizers see the program as one in transition—its three-part design of the fair, Bologna Book Plus, and Bologna Licensing Trade Fair/Kids contributing to a new shape and outlook, hoping to attract the wider book business in addition to the fair’s children’s focus.
What that meant this year can be understood by numbers now arriving from the Emilia Romagna:
- Total professional visitors: 28,894—that number is up 35-percent over 2022 attendance and nearly equivalent to pre-pandemic attendance levels
- Exhibitors: 1,456 from 90 countries
- Journalists: 750, with 35 percent from outside Italy–per organizers, “The journalists who attended represented not only the cultural sector, but also other industries, and they provided extensive coverage of the four-day fair in newspapers, magazines, offline and online media, national and international radio and television”
- Events: 325 over four days, up 25 percent over 2019
- “City events” organized and held by exhibitors off the BolognaFiere (fairgrounds) site: 260
- Online, the site is reported to have drawn more than 2 million views called for by 200,000 unique users, some 60 percent of those from abroad
- More than 60,000 people registered for online services (although some told us that they found the site “heavy,” and quite slow in its responsiveness again this year, as in the past)
- In various social media, the Facebook and Instagram reportedly communities numbered, respectively, 80,000 ( up 23 percent) and 90,000 (up 23 percent) followers, while LinkedIn attracted 10,000 followers (up 41 percent)
- In two months, more than 1,000 professionals took part in masterclasses, conferences, training courses, and special initiatives organized on the online platform’s “Open Up” program, which was offered as a “skill box” of training assets
For more reading, please see Publishing Perspectives, March 10, 2023: bolognas-60th-edition
Image: The Bookseller
