Hong Kong loves books, especially the ones printed on paper !!

A trip to the 2017 Hong Kong book fair was enough to see that Hong Kong has not lost its love for reading books. Just walking round you see parents with their children all enjoying the experience of being surrounded by some many books.

It's interesting to see people taking suitcases around and filling them full of books, its a nice change to see kids sat around reading books and not a device in sight. One thing that I thought was really interesting was the sort of educational books kids were looking at and buying. Sure we had all the traditional education books, but I saw many kids buying books on "How to make a youtube video","Building your own Robots"."Designing digital games","Getting started with Raspberry pi"(not a cooking book!!, "Getting started in Coding"'"Modding Minecraft". Interestingly most of the things today you will find hard to spot on the standard curriculum but all skills kids in this century need to have.

Having said that kids are looking for books on all these great new interesting things, its Hong Kong so you will still find huge stands dedicated to the star teachers who get paid big fat pay cheques by the cram schools to drill kids how to pass exams and nothing more, this is still the common practice. I'd like to think we are seeing change and I think this is true, but don't forget today in Asia the shadow education market is still as big in financial terms as the education market, businesses preying on parents and student anxiety of not passing exams.