Most Malaysians will probably have heard about the Big Bad Wolf Book Sale due to the fast-spreading word of mouth hype by reading fanatics everywhere. You'd be spreading the word like mad too if you had a chance to go shopping for books at 75%-95% off of the retail price. Yeah, that much off. It's kinda insane but hey, I'm not complaining. I do wonder how much money they're making but they probably got their stock for real cheap (returned stock that usually gets destroyed due to not selling/new stock). I mean $2-3 (RM8) for both paperbacks and hardcovers is just too good to pass on and there's 3 MILLION books on sale.
Here are a couple of pics of the venue to give a sense of perspective on just how huge this sale is. The following images are credited to
Big Bad Wolf Books.
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| Credit: Big Bad Wolf |
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| Insane amount of books. |
The sale started on Friday, the 7th of December, but some people got preview passes so they got dibs on the best books ahead of everyone else. There's every type of book that you can conceive of; from reference books on design/architecture to history books and every type of fictional novel. I went there on the 15th and I bought 5 Hardcovers, 10 paperbacks and 3 comic volumes for a cheapass total of RM131.
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| Paperbacks, got some weird stuff as well. |
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Only copy of this that I found.
Lady Luck was smiling upon me. |
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Hardcovers for RM8 each (divide by 3 for USD).
Damn good deals especially for The Wise Man's Fear,
the only copy I found in that entire place
(believe me when I say I searched every table!) |
I got some really awesome books but most of what I wanted wasn't available *sob sob* or most of the good books that I found (Wheel of Time books 12 and 13) didn't have the prequels so I ended up passing up on them. I couldn't find a single Mistborn book aside from Alloy of Law (which is a standalone novel, and not part of the trilogy). Ever since I got a Kindle, I've been far more selective regarding which books I end up buying since when you can get any book in the world (well the popular ones at least), you tend to be far less impulsive in buying just any old book that strikes your fancy. I've reverted to my old habits in that I buy books only to collect them and not mainly for reading. But once I start buying books in a series, I just have to complete the set!
The main issue I have is that unlike last year's sale, this year they've got a LOT of copies of the same books, as in dozens of duplicates of each book; no doubt contributing to the massive increase in books available for sale while at the same time they've sacrificed variety in order to gain quantity. I'm not saying there aren't a lot of different books, I'm just saying that even among those piles of books it's hard to find the ones you're looking for and most of the time you'll be seeing unfamiliar books more often than ones you recognize or are looking for. It made me wish I had a smartphone or laptop with me to look up all these strange books on Goodreads to see whether they're any good. In the end I ended up getting the books I've heard about and wanted to read but never had the cash to buy. I might be heading back to the BBW sale later this week to stock up on the books I missed out on in the hopes that they'll have added the rest of them (there were a lot of books in their storage area still to be unpacked from what I saw).
If you're interested in getting books from the sale don't fret! It's still on until the 23rd of December 2012. For more details check out the Big Bad Wolf website and facebook page:
http://bigbadwolfbooks.com/
https://www.facebook.com/bbwbooks
