manila international book fair

Next stop was the Manila International Book Fair, which opened that morning and ran through Sunday. The reason I decided to do an acquisitions trip at this time was so I could go to this book fair and, thereby, kill two birds with one stone. I wasn't really sure what to expect since I've never been to a real book fair; I wasn't sure how big a scale it was going to be.

Here is a picture from the entrance. As you can see from that red sign peeking, front and center was the huge booth for National Bookstore, probably the biggest bookstore chain in the country.

It was quite a big affair. There were chain bookstores, smaller independent bookstores, well-known publishers, and not-so-well known ones. Here I am at one of the smaller booths:

I was surprised at the sheer number of booths representing religious publishers. But I was very glad to see that they had an area for books from other ASEAN nations. Most of the vendors for this small section weren't there that day, though; I believe they had some meeting elsewhere.

I wrote down titles of books and got lists from whoever had them. My job was to look them up later in our catalog to see if we already owned them.

After going down all the aisles, it was time for dinner.