24. A Festival of Books

People joke that no one in Los Angeles ; everyone watches TV, rents videos, or goes to movies. The most popular reading material is comic , movie magazines, and TV guides. City libraries have 10 percent of the traffic that car washes . But how do you explain this? An annual festival in west Los Angeles is “sold out” after year. People wait half an hour for parking space to become available.
This outdoor festival, by a newspaper, occurs every April for one . This year’s attendance was estimated at 70,000 on and 75,000 on Sunday. The festival featured 280 . There were about 90 talks given by authors, an audience question-and-answer period following each talk. Autograph sought out more than 150 authors. A food sold all kinds of popular and ethnic foods, American hamburgers to Hawaiian shave ice drinks. Except a $7 parking fee, the festival was free. so, some people avoided the food court prices sneaking in their own sandwiches and drinks.
People from all over California. One couple drove down San Francisco. “This is our sixth year here . We love it,” said the husband. “It’s just to be in the great outdoors, to be so many books and authors, and to get very good deals, too.”
The idea for the occurred years ago, but nobody knew if it succeed. Although book festivals were already popular in US cities, would Los Angeles residents embrace one? “ are very unpredictable,” said one of the festival .




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