Have a great trip Simon! We'll hold down the fort.

Many new residents in Hong Kong start entertaining a growing suspicion: Hong Kong people don't read. These newbies don't see many bookstores, almost none at street level, and most of the bookstores they see sell English books. They go to showflats and find all of them, whether mansions or hovels, remarkably free of books. Then, they go to furnish their apartment, and discover that most furniture stores don't even provide bookcases, and the ones they do provide don't come even close to holding all their books. Yet Hong Kong is an international, cosmopolitan city. What gives?

The answer is complicated. Hong Kong people are of course busy, harried people, and find it difficult to squeeze a novel into their daily routine. And true enough, Hong Kong's business-first culture means there is not the same indoctrination of reading as a form of lifelong self-improvement.

But there are bookstores, it's just that many of them survive and even thrive on the 2nd or third storeys of buildings. And Hong Kongers are huge users of the public library system, which helps keep used books out of their tiny apartments, where they won't fit.

Still, it would come as a shock to that already jaded, three-months-in-the-Kong resident to wander over to the Convention and Exhibition Centre this weekend. The annual Hong Kong Book Fair is now on - a staggering 500,000 people visited last year, equal to the attendance on the July 1, 2003 march. This writer found himself over there yesterday morning and was blown away by the masses of people swooping into the Centre on a Thursday morning. It reminded him of his first visit to the new Sands casino in Macau, with a flood of people clamouring to pay HK$20 just to get in. Granted, there are discounts on books averaging 20%, but that it motivates almost 10% of the population to go check it out changes many stereotypes one might have about a literature-free public!