Written by Tasya
Who doesn’t love discount books? You can say that March and April is the most anticipated time of the year for me other than my birthday and Christmas. Other than the fact that there’s usually a new Marvel movie every April, it also means Big Bad Wolf is coming to Indonesia!
What is Big Bad Wolf? Big Bad Wolf (BBW) is a large-scale English book sale event that is hosted bi-annually in my country, Indonesia. However, they also have the event in Malaysia, Thailand, and Philippines. 2018 marks the third time they’ve come to Indonesia with it held in two different parts of Indonesia in March/April and September/October.
The reason why BBW is so popular because it offers a HUGE discount. Like a 60%-80% discount! Imported books usually range from IDR 150.000 for paperback/mass market paperback (around 10 USD) to IDR 1.500.000 (around 109 USD) for special edition books and I’ve even seen books sold at 218 USD. In BBW, paperback books are sold at IDR 65.000 or around 4.72 USD, while the expensive ones are around IDR 500.000 (36 USD). The reductions are very tempting, it’s no wonder the place is always flooded with visitors and you can queue for the cashier up to 3 hours during peak time.
The unique thing about BBW is they always open for 24 hours. This year, they opened for a total of 280 hours, meaning that they were open for 12 days straight! I’ve learned from experience to come late at night, therefore I went at 10pm. The place was huge, the venue used for this book fair is the venue usually used for concerts and it can have from 5000-18000 people so imagine how big it is! I spent 3 hours browsing through the place, and went home at 1am. And yes, I have morning classes the next day but really, I had no regrets.
The book collections were very extensive. You can find popular series like The Infernal Devices, Percy Jackson, even the Lara Jean series. You can also find old books such as The White Queen, Wicked Lovely, James Patterson’s books, and more. Other than reading, they also have non-fiction books ranging from language books to cooking and knitting.
However, I find that this year’s BBW is decreasing in book quality as half of the collection were children books, and not the story-children books but rather activity and puzzle children’s books. The fiction and non-fiction categories got a quarter of collection each, and they have to share it with their sub-genres (romance, YA, mystery, adult, etc). As a result of this, I found the collection quite lacking compared to last year, where I spent 3 hours browsing YA section only.
Other than that, the event was smoother than last year. It wasn’t as chaotic during the first few days as there were tickets sold for the pre-event. Plus the cashier system and post-payment-checking system were more organised too. As it was the middle of the night, I only needed to queue for 5-10 minutes before I got to pay my stuff. Not bad compared to last year where I had to queue for 30 minutes.
Overall? Despite the lack of fiction books, I still enjoyed browsing through the wide expanse of books. This year’s system is also so much better than last year, and I’ve seen much better reviews of the event too. In terms of price, BBW definitely has the best price around and if you are someone who will buy 3+ books, then this is an event worth attending!
Now here are the books I acquired from this year’s BBW:
Buried Giants by Kazuo Ishiguro // The Accidental Afterlife of Thomas Marsden by Emma Trevayne // Dangerous Days in Ancient Egypt by Terry Dreary // Tinder by Sally Gardner
Here are the list of books from the past 2 years of BBW:
Seed by Lisa Heathfield // Promise of Shadows by Justina Ireland // The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon // Reawakened by Colleen Houck // The Dead House by Dawn Kurtagich // Half Bad by Sally Green
