Come September 9, the Manila International Book Fair returns to SMX Convention Center in Pasay for its 47th edition. And if past years are any guide, expect long lines and big crowds, especially on weekends, as tens of thousands of readers, students, and workers travel in from Metro Manila and beyond. By the time the fair closes on September 13, more than 120,000 people will likely have passed through. This is a crowd larger than many provincial towns, drawn not by a K-pop concert or a holiday sale, but by books.
It is easy to dismiss a book fair as a shopping event. Based on the proliferation and success of book fairs all over the nation these past years, we know that it’s quietly becoming an economic and institutional event.
MIBF is happening on September 9 to 13 this year under the theme ‘GET LIT: Reading in a New Light.’ More than 165 exhibitors (from big book shops like Fully Booked and National Bookstore to university presses and Filipiniana specialists) will occupy two floors, alongside School World 2026, a parallel showcase of digital learning tools for schools. Entrance is a modest P50 (P35 for students, seniors, and PWDs), a price point deliberately kept low, because the fair’s real purpose is not retail, but to repair a reading culture that official data say is problematic.
The National Book Development Board’s 2023 National Readership Survey found that only 42 percent of Filipino adults had read a non-school book in the past year, down sharply from 54 percent in 2012. Among children, readership stood at 47 percent. The culprit was not disinterest but access: many respondents did not know if a public library existed near them, and most who did know never visited one. And when Filipinos do read outside school, it is largely religious texts and romance novels; only about one in 10 reaches for books on business, economics, or the social sciences. This is a gap with real implications for a workforce competing in a knowledge economy.
And this is precisely why fairs like MIBF matter. They compress, in five days, everything that our current library network cannot provide: discounted access to hundreds of thousands of titles and public programming that a bookstore aisle never offers. Plus, there are learning events, book launches, meet-and-greet events, and more.
A standout this year is ‘Better Life Through Copyright: Writers and Visual Artists Edition,’ a full-day event on September 9 at Meeting Room 9, organized by the Filipinas Copyright Licensing Society (FILCOLS) with MIBF and School World. Its agenda is refreshingly concrete: a distribution of remuneration to rights holders, followed by sessions on actual earning opportunities for photographers and visual artists, a talk from the Artist Welfare Project on creator welfare, and a discussion on community-building for women artists. Under the banner ‘Create. Protect. Inspire.,’ the event makes a point too often missed in culture-sector conversations: that copyright is not red tape but income, and that a fair’s job is not only to sell books but to show creators they can be paid for making them.
There are numbers to support this. The Philippine Statistics Authority values the country’s creative economy at P1.72 trillion, 7.1 percent of GDP in 2023, with media publishing and printing activities alone contributing P148.4 billion. Every book sold, every license honored, every royalty distributed at events like FILCOLS’ feeds that number. But the more durable return sits with the individual: a reading habit strengthens critical thinking and workplace literacy, while a functioning copyright system tells a Filipino photographer, writer, or illustrator that their work has market value and that they should be paid their due. Nations do not industrialize on infrastructure alone; they industrialize on the competence of people who can read a contract, and on creators who are confident enough to keep making the content that competence runs on and that the market will appreciate and support.
So the fair is worth attending not simply for the discounts and networking opportunities. It is worth attending because a country that reads less and protects its creators poorly also risks growing less. A book bought and a right respected are both small, compounding investments in our country’s future.