National Bookstore Cut-Price Book Sale 2017: NBS Cut-Price Book Sale 2017

Just in time for holiday gift-shopping, National Bookstore, the country’s leading bookstore chain, is having its annual Cut-Price Book Sale from October 20 to November 5, 2017. Those who missed the 2017 Manila International Book Fair have another chance at scoring exciting deals on books. Unlike the MIBF, which is held only in Manila and remains out of reach to those living in the farther regions of the Philippines, the National Bookstore Cut-Price Book Sale is held nationwide across all NBS branches. With a string of long weekends looming starting with the All Saints’ Day weekend, book lovers can look forward to uninterrupted spells of curling up to a new bestseller or revisiting timeless classics.

Although I’ve transitioned to reading e-books, I still get excited at the prospect of spotting deeply discounted gems from National Bookstore’s piles of bargain books. With all due haste, I headed straight to my nearest National Bookstore branch along Taft Avenue, only to be dismayed by the slim pickings at the discount shelves. I got the impression that the bookstore chain had sold off most of the good stuff at the recently concluded 2017 MIBF. The same titles that I’d seen last year were on display again at the discount bins. Worse, most of the books had yet to be tagged with color-coded stickers that serve as the usual guide to how much discount applies to a particular book.

When I expressed my frustration at the store’s apparent unpreparedness for its most awaited sale event, one sales clerk assured me that they were working overtime and that more books would be added to the 30% and 50% price-off categories. As well they should, because it’d be a crying shame if the National Bookstore Cut-Price Book Sale ceased to be the biggest book lovers’ bonanza that it had always been.

Nonetheless, many bestsellers were going for 10-20% less than their usual retail price. A hardcover copy of Haruki Murakami’s Men Without Women, for instance, was going for P796 instead of the regular P995, while the poetry books by Lang Leav and Rupi Kaur were priced at 20% off. A 20 percent discount is quite a bit of pocket change for box sets like the Harry Potter and Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire series, as well YA favorites like John Green and the Divergent series. Expect the books to be sold quickly at these prices, so run, don’t walk to a National Bookstore branch near you and get your holiday shopping done early.