Chennai Book Fair

Visited Chennai Book fair after couple of years. Amazed with the amount of books that were kept on display. It will confuse anyone if they are not clear on what they want to purchase. They also offer 10% discount on almost all the books. But I felt the versatility of these books are very limited. Broadly most of these books can be classified in to these categories :

- Self improvement

- Biography

- Kids related (Learning CDs, books, Rhymes, Drawing)

- Cooking recipes

- Spiritual

- Novels and short story collections in Tamil

Also, most of the books were in Tamil and there were lot of redundancy across shops. There were totally 600 stalls of which only 40 to 50 would be worth visiting and if you are not looking for books/CDs for your kid, then there may be only half of them which will have something interesting for you.

Please keep this in mind :

- Roughly know the kind of book that you want to buy. Do some research in Google around some of the books that are published in the year and their reviews.

- Have a clear budget in mind (Otherwise, you will spend more than you intend to and may not have money to purchase other interesting books you may find in later stalls).

- If you want to buy something in general in some area (Lets say some kid related book), do not buy it in the first shop.

- Have sufficient time. Make note of books that you intend to purchase in the first round and note down the shop number. Once you finalize the books you want to purchase, then go ahead and purchase it.

- If you are planning to buy lot of books, do not get the delivery immediately. You can ask them to keep the books in the shop itself and collect it while you are leaving.

- Most of the shops does not accept credit card. Show carry sufficient cash with you.

- Also, attend the speech given by eminent personalities around 6 PM. It is very educative, entertaining and refreshing.

Even if you are not planning to buy any books, attending and seeing the display of books itself is a totally different experience.

More details about the book fair :

Date : 30th Dec 2009 to 10th Jan 2010

Working Days : 2:30 pm to 8:30 pm

Holidays : 11:00 am to 8:30 pm

Venue : St.George Anglo Indian School,(opp to Pachayappan college)

Poonamalee High Road,

Aminjikarai, Chennai - 30.

Happy Reading!