Publishers hate unsold stock. It’s expensive to hold, expensive to return and is an unglamorous logistical headache nobody in the industry wants to deal with if they can avoid it. The now hugely successful annual mobile international book fair that is Big Bad Wolf has built itself entirely around that problem, and turned it into a ten day book-fiesta that Chiang Mai’s bibliophiles look forward to every year.
This is the fifth edition in Chiang Mai and we are told, the biggest yet. Over 40 publishing houses are taking part this time round and there will be well over one million books available for purchase.
“This is how the Big Bad Wolf has succeeded. It negotiates with many publishing houses to allow deep sales to get rid of it all,” Risuan Aramcharoen, Managing Director of Plan for Kids and former President of the Publishers and Booksellers Association of Thailand, tells Citylife. “Big Bad Wolf is an organisation which understands the pain point of the publishing world, the stock issues. Big Bad Wolf takes it off their hands, for cash flow.”
Books go for 10-20% of cover price, and the fair’s buying power has reached the point where publishers are the ones asking to be included rather than the other way round.
“Each year it gets more and more good feedback,” Risuan explains. “Thai publishers are seeing the power of the event, the marketing and PR, the prices and the appropriate selection of books. All key successes. And everyone wants to sell.”
“All sorts of large publishing houses now ask Big Bad Wolf to feature their books,” she says. “So the books are getting fresher and cheaper every year.”
This year’s fair is also heavily international, English-language titles pulled from publishers around the world, sitting alongside more Thai stock than the fair has ever carried. Over a million books in total will pass through Chiang Mai Hall at Central Chiang Mai Airport over the course of the fair.
Risuan’s own involvement goes back to the fair’s earliest days in Thailand. Big Bad Wolf itself started life in Malaysia, the idea of BookXcess founders Andrew Yap and Jacqueline Ng, whose bookstore built its business on this exact model—remaindered and excess stock bought up from international distributors. The very first sale ran for five days in May 2009, at Dataran Hamodal in Petaling Jaya, and the format proved popular enough that it eventually expanded across the region, into Indonesia, Myanmar, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, the UAE and Thailand. Risuan was the one who brought it to Chiang Mai.
“I used to do it in Bangkok until we moved up to Chiang Mai. I was able to arrange all of the local Thai publishing houses to join.”
Risuan, who has been in Thai publishing for decades, long enough that her career and the industry’s ups and downs are hard to separate, is a publisher of children’s books herself. For the past nearly 30 years she has been highly regarded in not just the Thai but also the international publishing world.
“My family believes that Thai kids need to read more and have better access to books,” she says. “With this belief, 28 years ago I invested in publishing children’s books. Today we have so many collections—KungKing, DinoGang and many others. I believe that reading starts with small children.”
She served two terms as President of the Publishers and Booksellers Association of Thailand, remembering the heydays of Thai publishing very fondly…in the days before it had to compete with a screen in everyone’s pocket.
“When I was president it was the peak of reading in Thailand, with lots of government support and budgets,” she recalls. “There was no internet, no new media, no Kindle interrupting it. It was great.”
When asked whether Thai people are reading less, she was emphatic in her response.
“Yes, there may be a decline in book purchases, but people’s habits have changed and they read online. It doesn’t mean that they don’t still read,” she says. “Some people will always enjoy reading a paper book—the scent, the feel.”
What changed, she expanded, is what people expect from a book.
“Today, people aren’t buying documentary-style books, because they can simply search the information online,” she explained. “But they still like fiction or entertainment, so it is up to the readers to adjust to the market. It’s also up to the marketing and PR.”
And then there’s the generation rewriting the terms completely.
“Today you even have Generation Y asking readers to dictate and tell them how books will go,” she says. “These are great new ways of consuming and reading. So Thai people do read. It’s just not necessarily traditional.”
For Risuan the real question was never books versus screens. It’s whether kids still develop the patience to sit with an idea and follow it somewhere on their own.
“It’s important to develop young minds, young minds’ ways of learning and absorbing,” she says, before adding, more cautiously, “Look at new families, young educated families. They see the importance of books. Some fail as they focus on the square screen. I guess we have to wait and see how it all turns out.”
She rates Chiang Mai’s odds highly. “Chiang Mai is admirable as it has the highest potential we have seen for book lovers outside of Bangkok,” she says.
The crowd here, she tells us, splits into three fairly distinct groups. Schools come with budgets and staff, teachers and heads of department shopping in bulk for their libraries. “This is very important, and we even have a delivery service for them,” she says. Then there’s the city’s international community. “The expats, they also buy in large numbers,” she says, noting a growing number of Chinese and Burmese readers too. “And the last group is Thai, the general public readers. So I am very happy with the readers in Chiang Mai.”
Anyone who’s been to a Big Bad Wolf before has seen the stacked trolleys, the excited browsers and the school teachers that treat the fair more like a pilgrimage than an errand!
This year there’s more of everything, adult and children’s titles, fiction and non-fiction, educational materials on top. Spend over 1000 baht and you get a coupon for Dino PlaySpace. There’s a talk booked in too.
“We will also be inviting Tubpong, a children’s author, to come and give a talk in Thai on the 30th in the afternoon, around 2pm-4pm,” Risuan says.
There’s a free area where students can come and demonstrate whatever they’ve been working on. “I want to see Ne Ne and other cool kids come to play,” she laughs.
Over a million books. More than 40 publishing houses. This is the largest number Big Bad Wolf has brought to Chiang Mai yet. Some of it is stock that’s simply reached the end of its shelf life elsewhere. Some of it is new, chosen specifically with Chiang Mai’s readers in mind.
International Book Sale featuring Big Bad Wolf books, Chiang Mai Hall, Central Chiang Mai Airport, 28th August – 6th September 2026, 10am-9pm daily.
