The Hindu Business Line : This year's book fest dons a new look

Wi-fi environment and a search engine facility for bookworms to locate the titles of their choice and the stalls vending them promise to enhance the attraction of this year's Bangalore Book Festival (BBF) starting on Friday.

The contemporary means adopted by the organisers highlights their efforts to enliven prosaic experience of visiting a book festival and add value for the readers to get instant idea about the collections on offer.

The fourth edition of the festival, which is organised by the Bangalore Booksellers & Publishers Association and Klub Class, a publishing firm, would also step up their efforts to give an impetus to children's reading habits through association with schools and libraries for holding symposium and sessions during the festival to encourage usage of public libraries.

Mr B.S. Radghuram, Programme Director of BBF, said the Wi-fi facility at the venue would help whet the appetite for `contemporary notions' of the young tech savvy Bangaloreans who would like to download information onto the electronic devices for making their choices.

He also informed that the festival organisers are planning to allocate some funds to help schemes in promoting reading habits among the students.

Mr Balaram Sadhwani, President of Bangalore Book Publishers Association, said this year the festival was expected to attract more than two lakh visitors during the 10-day event against 60,000 last year.

More than 250 stalls will display books of a variety of subjects and topics ranging from textbooks to technology, travel and leisure and books on new-age gizmos for GenX. Meanwhile, the Karnataka Government is thinking of increasing the library cess from six per cent to 10 per cent to mobilise more resources to fund libraries, the Minister for Primary and Secondary Education, Mr Basavaraj Horatti, said.

The model of Tamil Nadu, which levies 10 per cent cess was being studied, he told mediapersons here on Thursday. A proposal seeking enhancement in library cess would be sent to the Government shortly for approval, he said.

More Stories on : Events | Books | Karnataka

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