The 70th-anniversary bookfair has just finished in the German city of Frankfurt am Main. This is the world biggest book fair. Ukraine traditionally took part in it. This year the Book Arsenal presented there the virtual reality project Meeting Tukoni within the Ukrainian national stand. 

The Ukrainian representatives emphasized two major trends of this year bookfair in Frankfurt – eco direction and increasing attention to an audiobook. The eco trend is prevailing in the world for several years already and it is not expected to back down. It is applicable to both book production and their topic. One of its positions is to increase the popularity of audiobooks which are editions that have no special physical data storage. Editors consider audiobooks as a possibility to attract an audience that was not considered to be a part of readers before – the youth that addresses to literature during sports exercises, on the road or while doing some housework.

The technological development allows books to turn into audio recordings as well as full-scale virtual reality projects, as it was in the case of the Ukrainian Tukoni.

After visiting Frankfurt book fair I understood the one thing: Ukraine is on the same level with the advanced countries concerning ideas and their realization in the segment of the virtual book publishing. Both the employees of international festivals and fairs and the visitors paid a lot of attention to the project. In particular, Edward Nawotka, the editor of Publishers Weekly which is one of the most proficient edition in the area of the publishing industry, noted that Meeting Tukoni was made in a very professional way, actually looked as a virtual book and had no worthy competitors, - shares her opinion Oksana Khmelovska, the coordinator of the international festival the Book Arsenal and one of the initiator of the project.

She also notes that there actually weren’t many competitors at this year‘s fair. Most of them resembled animation that used VR glasses and had rather few interactive elements. However, several interesting projects were also presented. For example, a robot from Georgia determined age and mood of a visitor and chose a corresponding quotation from the Georgian book for him. The authors wanted to focus attention on the Georgian literature. In this section ART+, a virtual singer was presented. She answered the visitors’ questions, danced and sang. 

The virtual reality project Meeting Tukoni was created with the support of the charitable project LuckyBooks, illustrated by the Ukrainian artist Oksana Bula and made by New Cave Media. This year it was presented at the Book Arsenal in Kyiv. Several thousand people got acquainted with it, with the President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko and his wife Maryna among them. 

The team of Meeting Tukoni, inspired by attention and good reviews, is to present the project at the international competition of virtual books called VR Awards Book.