The world’s biggest book sale lands in Manila next month.
With 2 million titles on sale at big discounts 24 hours a day you could be forgiven for thinking Amazon is about to open a Kindle Philippines ebook store, but actually these are print books, sold in real time.
Amazon? Isn’t that a river in South America?
For those of us lucky enough to be able to access the Kindle store we take it for granted we have a choice of literally millions of ebooks to download.
But most of the world doesn’t have easy access to the Kindle store. Even countries with Kindle stores have territorial restrictions on what’s available, and in other parts of the world readers are either surcharged or cannot see the Kindle store at all.
But in any case browsing and navigating even a couple of hundred books on a screen is a nightmare, which is why discoverability remains one of the enduring appeals of physical bookstores.
And that means that, in countries where bookstore infrastructure is lacking, the choice of books is poor and prices high, readers turn to book fairs and book sales to sustain their reading habit.
Not cosy village events like we are used to in the west, where handfuls of books change hands, but massive events where literally millions of books are on the table and where literally millions of readers turn out to binge-buy books at great discounts.
Filipinos will have been looking on enviously as readers in other south-east Asian countries bought cartloads of books at the Big Bad Wolf sales, but this week comes news that the Big Bad Wolf is coming to the Philippines capital, Manila.
That’s the Big Bad Wolf book sale, not to be confused with Manila’s famous Big Bad Wolf restaurant.
From February 16 through 25 the first Filipino Big Bad Wolf sale will have two million books available in the Pasay City World Trade Centre and the sale will carry on 24 hours a day for the ten days.
If past Big Bad Wolf events in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Sri Lanka are anything to go by, Filipinos turning up in the early hours hoping to have a quiet browsing experience will be disappointed. There are no quiet times at these events!
All we have so far on this is a Big Bad Wolf press release, and as yet the website has not been updated to include the Manila event, so expect more news on this story as it unfolds.
If two million print books at one event seems a lot, maybe you’re new here, because that’s less than half of the 4.5 million books that were available at the Malaysia Big Bad Wolf sale just last month.
Ten things you can relate to at the world’s biggest book sale – 4.5 million books at great discounts
And for more on the Big Bad Wolf sales here at TNPS check out these past posts:
The World’s Biggest Book Sale. And no, Amazon has nothing to do with it
