Big Bad Wolf book sale expands

Malaysia’s Big Bad Wolf (BBW) book sale, marketed as the ‘biggest book sale in the world’, will expand to Bangkok for the first time. Running from 12-24 August and opening 24-hours on weekends, the book sale will contain two million copies of English-language books valued at THB 200m (A$7.6m). BBW has become a ‘phenomenon’ in Malaysia, where people queue as early as 4am prior to opening, because of the promise of 60-80% discount from the retail price. Andrew Yap and wife Jacqueline Ng founded Malaysian bookstore BookXcess in 2006 and have run the BBW sale since 2009. The books for BBW fill a 18,000 sqm warehouse space and are imported from Australia, Europe and America, with the main publishers being HarperCollins, Penguin Random House and Alfred A Knopf. Yap buys nonfiction titles and Ng specialising in fiction and children’s books, each spending up to two weeks at the six major trade book fairs. In May this year, the sale opened in Jakarta, Indonesia for the first time and had up to 25,000 customers per day. Yap plans to expand the sale to China next year and hopes to also include Vietnam.

Category: International news