Off to Taiwan for the TIBE

The Taiwan International Book Exhibition is the largest book fair in Asia, with 500,000 visitors over the course of five days. Visitors include not just publishers, agents, and booksellers, but also teachers, parents, and kids who wander through the exhibition halls looking for fun and educational products.

Tumblehome Learning plans to operate on two continents from the start, with offices in Taiwan and the US. We're hoping to get a lot of cross-cultural enrichment, learning and sharing practices across both countries. Introducing ourselves at the TIBE is our way of starting that process.

I'll be leaving in the early hours of tomorrow morning for the 29-hour journey to Taipei, for a late Monday night arrival. (Taipei is thirteen hours ahead of Boston.) There I'll meet up with Tumblehome Learning's Taiwan staff, which currently includes our president, Barnas Monteith, and Yu-yi Ling, our Asian business manager.

We'll be there in Booth A907 in Hall 1, showing off the ARCs, Chinese and English, of our first books. We'll also display some engineering books from the Boston Museum of Science along with Lost in Lexicon and a teaser for The Ice Castle, which will be coming out in August.

We'll attend tea parties hosted by countries and publishers, and we'll meet with agents and publishing companies from other Asian countries to see if they have any interest in acquiring our products. We'll also talk to teachers and parents to get feedback on the idea of paired books and science activity kits as well as how the covers look, what font size to use in the final books, and other details.

In the second week I'll give a talk about a child's memories of the early days of Intel to Intel Taiwan employees, and Barnas and I will meet with education officials, science museum officials, printers, and leaders of technology. I'm really hoping to begin to understand the drive for excellence in science and technology that is so important in Taiwan. Maybe there are some things our own country can learn.

I'll post pictures and let you know how it goes!