Book Fair or Authors' Fair?

During these last years, I have noticed a kind of "aggressiveness" of the authors, that on the days of the Fair, they attract the readers-buyers as strongly as possible towards their books, which still carry the smell of typography. Thus the Fair has become an "Authors' Fair" more than a "Book Fair". The book has been sacrificed and continues to be sacrificed on the altar of the authorial self...

I kind of understand new authors, who are still in the fever of their first releases and like small children screaming in the attic for attention, but it's a little difficult to understand authors who already have a creative career on their shoulders.

After leaving the hands of the author, each book has its own destiny and its own journey. It has a life of its own, independent of that of its creator. The readers themselves will promote it by talking about it with their friends, writing their impressions about it through their profiles on social networks, making reviews, writing press releases, etc. No matter how well you advertise the book, it is the only product that does not depend on it at all.

This kind of obsessive obsession with advertising the book (read the author's) actually hides the great existential crisis that current culture in general has fallen into: culture (and therefore the book) as consumption. It is necessary that through commercial "promotion", the book also enters consumer products. This is the death of the book, the death of culture.

It would be nice if meetings about books at the Fair were about those that have been published in previous years. A book is not measured by its sales, but by its readers. With those who probably borrow it from public libraries because they can't buy it, but read it three or four times. Measuring it through the sales of the barab book with a smartphone, with a bag or with a signature garment.

The author does not promote the book, but the book the author. That's the only way the author and the book become classics, and that takes its own time. It is the reader who makes an author or a book a classic, not its commercial consumption.

And a side note. When will our book culture create translators from classical languages? Perhaps the time has come to re-translate some works from ancient Latin and Greek.