THE deep benefits of a strong reading culture is well acknowledged. “Words change worlds” – says Pam Allyn in her concise quote on the powerful impact of reading.
Margaret Fuller adds: “A reader today, a leader tomorrow”.
Both vivid and punchy quotes point to the definitive benefits of a well-read population.
But what if high cost of books deter people at large from buying books they may otherwise be interested to read and enjoy.
Here I was in the UAE. Invited and sent to cover Emirate Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival 2025.
The most unexpected surprise was to find a Malaysian right there with a conscious solution to this real cost factor with the largest and most popular booth offering maximum discounts!
The star? Andrew Yap, co-founder of KL-hailed globally acclaimed Big Bad Wolf Book Sale. Credited to have touched over five million readers and sold 30 million books across 34 cities.
Through boundless reach of books with jaw dropping discounts up to 95pc at times.
His tacit mission? To make reading accessible and books affordable, to all.
No surprise he popped up in the UAE with a big bang.
And at an event most relevant to its core founding purpose.
Most happy of all for the Daily Express.
Founder Andrew Yap, was not shy to confess he flopped SPM because poor childhood denied him books and grew up a non-reader.
But in the end, a SPM flop has transformed the book industry.
Sharjah Book Authority found just the kind of partner it wants to foster the reading culture. The moment Andrew turned up at fair, Daily Express grabbed him for this key interview.
Daily Express (DE): Okay, here we are, can you tell me how you started your book selling business?
Andrew Yap: We started in Kuala Lumpur back in 2007 with a tiny little bookshop. It’s called BookXcess.
It was just a 500sq ft shop.
We were not sure whether Malaysians want to read or not because you know, Malaysians don’t have a reading culture. But I always felt that if books were accessible and affordable, Malaysians will read.
So we started a tiny little bookstore to see whether it’s viable, how people would respond. And the response was very good.
We started in M Corp Mall, Petaling Jaya back in 2007. After six months we moved to a bigger store 3,000sq ft.
Then we gave ourselves two years to really see if we are able to pull all our efforts into this business – another test not only to see whether Malaysians really want to read, if it’s affordable but also to learn how to run a bookstore because we were not from the book industry.
And I am also not a reader! Within that period, we were approached to clear a big number of books. That gave birth to BookXcess which started Big Bad Wolf.
We were approached to clear 100 or 1000 books at one go and there was like five times the amount of this but we were only a tiny bookstore then.
My dream was always to sell a novel in Malaysia below 10 ringgit.
To me, if a novel or a paperback is sold below ten ringgit, that is the magic price where a Malaysian would pick up a book without thinking about the price because at that time books were around 40 ringgit.
At BookXcess we were only able to half the retail price so roughly 17-18 ringgit. To me it was a good price, but still not cheap enough that every Malaysian could afford.
So when we were approached to do this big event to clear up these books, we had the liberty to choose how much we wanted to sell.
That gave me the chance to experiment the idea I always had: Would Malaysians genuinely want to read because they cannot afford to?
Ware house style sale called ‘Big Bad Wolf’
Need speaks. As we need to clear 1,000 books in a few days, we came up with a big warehouse sale style we called Big Bad Wolf.
That was the first ever Big Bad Wolf in 2009.
We managed to clear that 120,000 books in five days! That gave us the encouragement and momentum to go a next step further.
We kept on growing, kept on bigger to test the market, there is a saying: know thy limit, what is the limit in Malaysia?
We did another one with 200,000 books That was also a big success!
Then we grew to 300,000 books but still very low-end warehouse style.
Now we wanted to take it another step further.
Discovered – Malaysians really want to read
So in 2011 we decided to do the world’s biggest book sale in Malaysia – 1.5 million books, 10 times the size of this (Sharjah) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
That set the benchmark for us – going into a professional convention centre.
It’s the world’s biggest book sale – 1.5 million books, a major success.
We sold 90pc of the books and that really showed that Malaysians really want to read!
It’s just that they cannot afford to. Moving forward, 2012 we grew from 1.5 million to three million books! We started doing 24 hours.
Our event was known for 24 hours non-stop for 11 days.
We keep on growing and growing and growing!
Bold move
The year 2016 was the big move for us. We did the bold move of going out of Malaysia.
Our first event was in Jakarta, the same year, 2016, Bangkok. Now we are in over 50 cities in 15 different countries!
So let’s start with Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Pakistan, South Korea, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kenya and Tanzania.
We are trying out this is a mission-based business.
One of the reason it became a mission-based business is I never grew up with books. I was very fortunate to go to a very good school in Kuala Lumpur – St John’s Institution, one of the best schools.
And how did I manage to get in? My father was an ex-St John’s, he played football for the school.
So he managed to get me in. Sadly he passed away when I was nine years old.
Mother had to do two jobs and to take care of the four of us.
We were all still very young. He didn’t leave us anything. With two jobs, mom had no time to read to us.
Irony: ‘Books never in my life’
Of course, books were never in my life. Imagine the kind of kids that go to the school, even Najib (ex- Prime Minister) went to St John’s.
So I can see firsthand the damage to a child who never grew up with books versus a child who grew up with books.
My classmates speak better. They write better. They are more confident. Their general knowledge is better.
Everything is better because they all grew up with books.
Up to standard three, I couldn’t recite my ABC in the right order.
Imagine the kind of trauma I had going into an elite school like, with learning disabilities, when never growing up with books.
Trauma, growing up, with different kinds of trauma – I felt very inadequate.
Failed SPM!
Fast forward, many years later, I even failed my SPM. So I have no diploma, no degree. I love cars, love motor racing, if you are not rich but have your own garage, you fix own racing car by the side, it enables me go motor racing, I was running a workshop.
So I was in the car industry with my own workshop. Suddenly, an opportunity to sell books at a good price arose.
That brought me back to my memories. I can now make a difference, I can ensure that children have a chance to ensure that children have access to books.
That’s why I jumped at the opportunity. Even though I’m not from the industry, even though I got no knowledge about books, I just wanted to make sure that children have access to books.
So I jumped at the opportunity in 2007. I started a little bookstore to see whether it works.
Now in Kuala Lumpur we have 22 stores and they are huge.
Some are 38,000 square feet, the biggest in Malaysia.
Even in Malaysia we have book fairs in every state, even Sabah, Sarawak.
Because it’s very big, a lot of people go to our event even in KK, last year, we held it Boulevard Hall, Kuching.
DE: That’s a surprised. Back to your beginning, who approached you to dispose 100,000 books in the first place?
Yap: A big distributor of books in Southeast Asia. They had all these extra books returned stores, all new returns. Let’s say a store ordered 50 copies, 30 sold, left 20.
These returns go back. What are they going to do with all these overstocks? They are stuck. They want to clear them for new shipments coming in. They gave us the opportunity to see whether we can help them clear it.
DE: How did they know you can clear it?
Yap: Because they know we are in the affordable book industry, they gave us a trial.
DE: By cheap, how much cheaper do you normally do?
Yap: In Malaysia it’s about 75% off the regular return price.
DE: That’s huge. So you’re saying price matters in promoting the reading culture?
Yap: To me, of course. If the book is even 50 cents but it’s a lousy book, nobody will pick it up. So it must be a good book, a decent book and it’s at an affordable price to begin with, for sure you can see the crowds here versus everywhere else is a testament because of the price.
They have similar books, even better books than the latest but people cannot afford. Children need books every day.
If every parent would have it their way, they would love to have books for their children every night.
Imagine you’ve got four kids of different ages, how are you going to have one book a week, 50 books a year?
How are you going to afford 200 oldbooks a year if one book is 50 ringgit – a lot of money.
Overseas they can afford when one children’s book is US$10, minimum wage is US$17-8 per hour whereas the average Malaysian minimum wage you work one whole day you can’t afford even one book. That’s true, that’s why there is no reading culture.
Main reason for ‘no reading culture’
Books are expensive. That’s one. It’s a lot of money but overseas they can afford because one children book is 10 US dollars their minimum wage is 17-18 dollars one hour so of course they can afford whereas the average Malaysian, you work the whole let’s say your minimum wage, you work the whole day you can’t even buy one book.
That’s true. That’s why there’s no reading culture. The main reason there’s no reading culture is because books are expensive. It is one of the biggest reasons. But we can make a big difference.
What I’m trying to do is tell publishers if you can sell books you will be able to sell 10 times more.
You will be more profitable. But publishers would say who is going to prove it?
Who is going to do it, because bookstores are all localised.
When you are localized you don’t have the volume. That’s why we need to be international. It means when we buy a title, we buy up to 5,000 to 10,000 one title.
Whereas a bookstore will buy 50-100 copies, we buy 10,000 per title.
DE: Is that why you went global, such as your large presence at the UAE?
Yap: Yes. That’s why we were actually forced to go global because I needed the volume.
It’s very interesting. This is a mission-based business. It’s very different from any other business. It’s run by passion, mission-based. The purpose is to change the world through books. Nelson Mandela said that education is the most powerful weapon to change a nation.
We come from a developing country and our education system is not going to change.
How many generations had gone, they cannot even decide Bahasa Malaysia or English. Don’t worry about if we can get books out to all the kids.
You see a better Malaysia, a better world.
Noticed by ‘amazing’ Sharjah Book Authority
Publishers can only sell to 3pc or 4pc of the world’s population. The 90pc of the world’s population got no chance to read.
It’s always been like that for the last 100 years. So what we are trying to do is to change that. It’s a very important mission.
That’s why the Sharjah Book Authority is our business partner.
The Sharjah Book Authority does this amazing thing.
It is an amazing entity.
They do so many programs to keep the book industry moving.
So when they noticed us, they partnered with us.
They decided to buy half of our Middle Eastern operations to enable us to carry on our mission in the Middle East and Africa.
The reason why we are able to do Saudi and Egypt.
I missed out Egypt but we did Egypt 6 months ago because of the help from the Sharjah Book Authority, we did Saudi because of them.
We did Tanzania and also Kenya. Can you imagine a Malaysian company want to go and do business in Kenya? You might lose your pants correct or not?
DE: Oh, now it explains your big-time presence in Sharjah but we didn’t see you in 2024.
Yap: We did not participate last year but we have our office and warehouse in Sharjah, we have our own event.
You see in this hall twice the size of any full of our own books. We have our big event in Dubai, We are actually a standalone company. That’s why we are called the world’s biggest book sale. This is just like a bite-size thing that we do. They give us an opportunity to be here so we just took the opportunity. But normally we do it on our own.
Next month, we’re going to Ajman City (capital of Ajman – smallest of seven emirates in UAE). We are taking a Convention Centre, just us only to do our event.
But I must say Sharjah Book Authority is very visionary which keeps the book industry churning.
They are supporting the book industry globally.
DE: Malaysia does not have anything called a book authority?
Yap: Yes, it is unique because the ruler of Sharjah (Sheikh Sultan bin Muhammud Al-Qasimi) is an educator, prolific reader and author. They built a university city here which cost billions. All the top universities in UK, US, around the world have a campus here. The whole city in Sharjah is like a massive campus.
UAE is like the hub for Middle East and Africa for education because of the ruler of Sharjah. He also created the Sharjah International Book Fair which I think is more than 50 years now. They have the book sellers conference the publishers conference, the children reading festival so there’s a lot of things that’s going on.
The Sharjah Book Authority also supports the Frankfurt Book Fair, the London Book Fair, all the global book fairs around the world so it’s very different.
They have a mission, also to change the world through books not just in Sharjah but globally.
That’s why we decided to partner up with them because we have the same mission.
DE: You didn’t read as a child, have you picked up reading?
Yap: You know I am also the purchaser, I lead the purchasing team. Yes, I started reading. We have 200,000 square feet facility in Kuala Lumpur just to process books that come in. We have a warehouse in Bangkok, UAE.
Indonesia and Philippines are our biggest market. Filipinos love reading, the readership in Philippines is very, very high even though it is a developing nation but readership and literacy is higher than Malaysia and other countries among developing countries.
When we announce Big Bad Wolf sale is coming to Manila, they ask for the date, saying they need to borrow money to buy affordable books.
They are poor, many people fall below the minimum wage but these people would borrow money to come to our event to buy books.
When I say they have a high readership, it is a different mentality.
The poor there also want to read whereas the poor in Malaysia the last thing they are thinking is reading.
