Elbowing for books
The visibly youthful crowd was there, declaring to their peers: buying and carrying a book is cool.
Text size
The visibly youthful crowd was there, declaring to their peers: buying and carrying a book is cool.
It was, channeling tennis big gun Novak Djokovic’s now-familiar take on Alex Eala’s massive fan turnout at the Australian Open, “a very good problem.”
And the “very good problem” was the 230,000 book lovers streaming through last week’s suffocation-level five-day Manila International Book Fair 2026 (MIBF) at the SMX Convention Center in Pasay City.
It could have gone the other way. Just imagine, as Djokovic similarly imagined an empty tennis stadium while Alex Eala was playing, if there was hardly anyone, particularly kids, browsing through row upon row of shelved books in an eerie, empty hall.
By any problematic metric, therefore, the crowding and elbowing for books by throngs of usually screen-addled kids chasing dopamine dragons on Instagram or TikTok, now visibly caressing with their scrolling fingers an ad-free artifact once known as a “book,” had a certain beauty.
Impression-wise, the visibly youthful crowd was there declaring to their peers: buying and carrying a book is cool; better yet, not having a book in its paper version during this pixelized digital age is super lame.
As always, trend-conscious kids scowl at being uncool and lame.
No wonder visibly thrilled MIBF organizers were trumpeting the book fair’s bumper attendance this year, even as they promised to correct the “very good problems” of long, tiring queues, painful waits, exhausting crowded book aisles, and jostling greedy book hoarders and profiteering resellers with perhaps a far more cavernous venue next year.
So, if by all accounts this year’s highly anticipated local grand slam for books went over the top, does it mean a quarter of a million Filipinos, as one writer quipped in another context, perhaps have had enough of the “brain-bleaching bilge on YouTube?”
Apparently. It now seems that many can go moments “without suckling on the eternal teat of Mother iPad” or smartphones by pleasurably turning the pages of a real physical book.
But then matters seem ripe. In a recent study on who reads the most in a year in Southeast Asian countries, Filipinos came in fourth, together with the Vietnamese, while Singaporeans were on top. Filipinos spent 123 hours reading while Singaporeans spent 155 hours.
Of course, we can do better in getting more reading hours in, if only there were more bookstores and libraries all over the country.
Anyway, no matter how this shouts that reading isn’t dead, the ugly thought remains that reading a book is a lost art.
The candied dopamine machines in our pockets and on our bedside tables make many of us put down a book, or worse, rarely pick one up.
Still, lost art or not, many Filipino kids are seemingly bent on messaging us all that book buying or the showcasing of books bought on Instagram or TikTok is a form of “resistance.” Some sort of public duty against brain rot and stupidity.
Cynics, however, say that’s useless “performative resistance.” Still, who knows if showing a love of books could help us reverse the current moment’s covert drive to partisan stupidity.
Nonetheless, even without that form of “resistance,” all the book buying on social media manages to show one good thing: many still have a passion for books.
Thus, “it would be better to describe the reading (of books) not as a public duty but as a private pleasure, sometimes even a vice,” writer Adam Kirsch said recently.
That can also be said of the recent MIBF.
