Shillong, Nov 05: The Central Library of the North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong is organizing a two-day NEHU Book Fair during 6th& 7th November 2024 in the Multi-Use Convention Hall, NEHU Campus, Shillong. The NEHU Book Fair will be formally inaugurated by Prof.Prabha Shankar Shukla, Hon’ble Vice-Chancellor, NEHU.
Book fairs play a vital role in the publishing world as they bring together publishers, agents, distributors, retailers and book lovers together on a single platform.
The NEHU Book Fair will essentially be a display of books by a group of reputed publishers and vendors for promoting sales and stimulating interest in their existing stock and recent publications, in addition to further enhancing the reading habit among the academic community and the society as a whole.
It would be relevant to recollect the humble beginnings of the North-Eastern Hill University Central Library which started with a collection of 600 books in 1973, and has now become a premier university library of the North-Eastern Region of India with a collection of about 3 lakh printed volumes supplemented by an enormous volume of e-resources.
The NEHU Central Library at Shillong and the NEHU Campus Library at Tura together cater to the needs of the students, research scholars, faculty, administrators and staff of the university.
To this day, printed books (especially textbooks and recommended books) continue to be dependable sources of vital information for the university’s academic community. In this regard, it is worth noting that book publishing continues to be a multi-billion dollar industry and still outsells e-books in most countries, including India.
With the implementation of the National Education Policy 2020and the entailing curricular transformation, the Central Library felt the need to organize a book fair to enable the faculty members, research scholars and students of the university and its affiliated colleges to visit, review and recommend the books relevant to their specialized interests and academic pursuits.
The specific objective of this book fair is, therefore, to connect the university fraternity with the relevant and recent publications of leadingpublishers.
With seventeen publishers, distributors and booksellers participating, the NEHU Book Fair will provide an open platform to the faculty members, research scholars and students of the University including those from the affiliated colleges to get acquainted with the latest edition of the published books in their subject areas.
It will also give a chance to the publishers to showcase their frontlist as well as generate interest about their backlist. Visitors to this book fair can buy or recommend books of their choice which they otherwise might not pick up from online stores.
This convergence is also expected to facilitate the review and recommendation of books to revitalize the collections of the Central Library and the Campus, Departmental and College Libraries.
