Chinese crowd an outdoor second hand book market in Beijing. Books from China‘s Cultural Revolution and controversial novels once banned in China can now be found at the market. PHOTO -TASR/AP

BERLIN – Forty German authors are hoping to set a new world record by conceiving, writing and printing a book in 12 hours, the event‘s organisers said last Tuesday. Stiftung Lesen, a foundation that promotes reading, will give the team of writers a topic at 7.45 a.m. on World Book Day, April 23. They aim to have the finished book on shop shelves in 10 German cities by the evening of that day. With each author‘s contribution set at about two pages and a foreword, the book will be 96 pages long.

„Generally, people associate writing a book with years of brain-racking and reflection. We wanted to make the point that print literature can still hold its own in the age of the Internet“, spokesman Christoph Schaefer told Reuters. Last year, the foundation based in Mainz marked World Book Day by publishing the world‘s biggest children‘s detective book, in which 17,000 children provided a separate ending to an initial story idea. Reuters