adesso, a partner of the Leipzig Book Fair, designs the platform for Leipzig liest extra

adesso delivers the central content platform for the Leipzig Book Fair and its reading festival, which conveniently presents the fair’s visitors with all of the content on a single website. Until the end of May, the web address at www.leipziger-buchmesse.de will serve as a lively hub for literature fans from German-speaking countries who cannot visit the fairgrounds in person. Interested viewers can experience the events in live streams from the comfort of their own home or attend the readings live on location. The advantage of the hybrid concept for the Leipzig Book Fair is that all of the readings, meet-the-author sessions and discussions will remain accessible even after the event as streaming offers available until autumn. Users can look forward to a database full of encounters with literature, authors and publishers.

For Oliver Zille, the director of the Leipzig Book Fair, having to cancel the 2021 Leipzig Book Fair was a bitter decision – which is why he is so pleased to present the reading festival as a special event: “The current conditions permit us to hold our Leipzig liest reading festival both digitally and live. As a fair which offers encounters with literature and serves to make literature visible, we live from personal contact. The digital aspect is an important foundation for the success of our event.”

In addition to the technical framework for the Leipzig Book Fair website, which serves as a digital content hub, adesso is also responsible for integrating the ticket shop system, providing the website search function and managing exhibitor, product and event data.

adesso has supported Leipzig Messe GmbH since 2012. After initially acting as an implementation partner for the website’s central content management system, the IT service provider took on the expansion and modernisation of the entire web application landscape for the trade fair company, with its year-round trade fairs and conventions, in 2019. Last October, for example, adesso was responsible for the online implementation of OTWorld 2020, the leading international trade fair for prosthetics and orthopaedics. The project encompassed the architecture for the web landscape along with the integration of exhibitors and exhibits, as well as technical implementation and live support during the three-day trade fair. The online platform developed by adesso proved to be exceptionally stable and not only handled the massive access traffic by the international industry visitors but also effortlessly enabled changes at short notice during the trade fair thanks to the IT service provider’s consistently agile design.

Matthias Folk, Head of Digital Services/Systems at Leipzig Messe: “2020 – the year of Covid – was a trial by fire for pure online trade fairs. Never before in our history had we as a trade fair company been forced to switch from live trade fairs on our premises to purely digital events. This was a major challenge that we were able to overcome successfully with the support of an experienced IT expert like adesso.”

More information about the Leipzig liest extra events from 27 to 30 May 2021 is available at https://www.leipziger-buchmesse.de.