When the Book Fair was started far back in the 1980s, there was a lot of whining in the publishing industry.
Sure, the fair generated a lot of media attention, but who really benefited from it?
The large publishers paid for the party with their large, expensive stands, but often it was small publishers or seminar guests who seized the media space.
And - recurring - why does the fair have to be in Gothenburg?
It was just impractical and expensive when all the publishers, yes the whole of literary Sweden, were in Stockholm?
Several years into the 90s, the major publishers oscillated between jumping on and off and were critical and threatened to fimble this whole Gothenburg thing through a broad boycott.
Now, well into the twentieth century, thank God society is more dynamic, more versatile, the public discourse enormously much more polyphonic - and the old, ridiculous and obscured, Stockholm dominance is relaxed.
Of course, this is not only due to the book fair's success story, but in the Swedish version of the cultural life's development towards diversity, it has played an important role that the big fair exists and that it is located in Gothenburg.
Therefore, it gives a rather awkward impression that the all-digital Book Fair 2020, certainly for corona reasons, in practice takes place in Stockholm.
Exhibition general Frida Edman spends the exhibition weekend in Stockholm.
From the inauguration at Fotografiska, over the exciting conversations and panels - almost the entire Book Fair takes place in the royal capital, from where the celebrity flows out to the book-loving congregation in the countryside.
It's a little sick.
When the network makes the contacts limitless and the location unimportant - then the only effect is that the establishment does not have to travel to Gothenburg.
Depressing.