The Big Bad Wolf Book Sale goes to Davao

Dabawenyos have been salivating for months now after the Big Bad Wolf, perhaps the biggest book sale in the world, went to Manila and then to Cebu. The wait is over because the BOOK SALE will finally come to Davao City particularly at The Tent at Azuela Cove from November 23 to December 2 this year.

Malaysian book shop BookXcess has finally relented to the unceasing demand from Davao bookworms. The venue may be a lot smaller than the usual venues of the Big Bad Wolf BOOK SALE but they are definitely not letting that issue stop them from letting Dabawenyos experience the event.

“Any book sale event usually costs an estimated US$3 to US$5 (roughly P160 million to P288 million) depending on the country and the size of the event,” BookXcess co-founder and executive director Jacqueline Ng said in Monday’s press conference where they officially declared Davao as venue of the next Big Bad Wolf Book Sale.

While she did not mentioned the exact amount needed to mount the event, Ng said staging the world’s biggest book sale requires costly logistics to include rental of the venue and the payment for hundreds of event workers, not to mention the cost of the books.

“In Davao the venue is quite small and we will be selling one million books compared to Jakarta where the venue is a 20,000 square meter area with up to five million books,” she said. The Davao venue is a lot smaller with a 2,000 square meter area with only a million books up for sale which means the overhead costs involve could be lesser.

The brand new books, which includes fiction, non-fiction bestsellers, young-adult fiction as well as an extensive collection of children’s books, will be sold at a discounted price of 50 to 90%.

Ng did not disclose the target sales they expect from Davao but given that the one million books will be sold at P200 each, the book sale will have an estimated sales of P200 million.

However, she said they do not really consider the Big Bad Wolf Book Sale as a business-for-profit venture since the objective is to just “make ourselves sustainable and we do not go bankrupt.”

She said they work with sponsors who help with the logistics and in the event publicity. The goal is to provide people with better access to books and at a cheaper price, she added.

“If we looked at it in cents and dollars then the company would not have started at all,” she said.

Big Bad Wolf Philippines Marketing Head Miguel Mercado said it took a lot of effort to bring the Big Bad Wolf in the city given the challenge of choosing a venue for the book sale. The book sale, which will be open to the public 24 hours a day, will be held for 10 days.

Mercado said the Big Bad Wold Book Sales has always attracted hundreds of thousands of people, with the biggest number of visitors recorded in Jakarta with 700,000 people. This is followed by Kuala Lumpur with 500,000, Bangkok with 300,000, Manila with 250,000 and Colombo with 150,000.

Since the Big Bad Wolf Book Sales was first held in 2009 at Dataran Hamodal, Petaling Jaya in Malaysia, it has been to eight cities. The largest number of books sold so far was in Kuala Lumpur with 4.5 million books.

“In the next year or two we will be in 30 cities. Dubai Book Sale just happened, then Europe, South America and Central America,” he said.