Thailand's book fair just admitted used books matter. That took long enough.

By Andy — 2026-07-08 — used books Thailand

I walked past a secondhand stall at Chatuchak last month and watched a teenager pick up a battered novel for 50 baht. They checked the spine, flipped it open, bought it. No hesitation.

That's the reader PUBAT finally noticed.

This October, Book Expo Thailand—the 31st one, running October 23 to November 1 at the Queen Sirikit National Convention Centre—is doing something that sounds boring but actually means something. They're giving used books their own zone. Not hidden in a corner with the damaged stock. A real zone, labeled, organised, sitting alongside fiction and comics and all the rest.

Three decades. It took three decades.

PUBAT's explanation was all about affordable reading. Fair enough, but it's more or less only half the story. Last October's fair pulled in 1.5 million people and 474 million baht in sales. That's up 8.2% from the year before. Average spend per visitor jumped from 600 to 700 baht to roughly 1,000 baht. And Gen Z—people aged 12 to 28—accounted for about 70% of those visitors, up 20% from the previous year.

Those numbers are the actual explanation.

A kid who spends a thousand baht at a book fair is either very loyal or they're buying multiple things. Actually, that's not quite right—they could be one person who came with five friends and we're counting total spend. But either way, the point is clear. The young people walking through that centre aren't price-insensitive. They're careful. They want what they want, and they'll spend to get it. A secondhand section doesn't compete with that. It feeds it. Someone buys a thriller for 50 baht, likes it enough to come back, suddenly you've got a 1,000-baht customer for life.

The industry knows this now, or at least PUBAT does. Used books stopped being the informal economy a while ago. You can find them at independent shops in Bangkok's older streets, the weekend markets, along Khao San Road—they exist everywhere except the official floor of the country's biggest fair. Until now.

What's interesting is that PUBAT seems to have skipped the entire stupid phase that slowed down publishers elsewhere. The phase where they fought lending libraries and resale platforms as if borrowed books were lost sales. All the data says they're not. Libraries and secondhand shops expand readership. But some industries take years to accept that. PUBAT looked at their numbers and moved on.

The foreign-language pairing in that same zone matters too, as far as I can tell. It says something like this: we're grouping everything that sits outside the mainstream shelf together. Secondhand Thai novels, English paperbacks, translated works—if you want something different, here's where you find it cheaper and easier. That's not accident. That's strategy.

They haven't announced a sales target for this edition yet, but I'd be surprised if they're not expecting to break 474 million baht. The conditions are there. The audience is younger and spending more. The layout is broader. And for the first time, someone who can't afford new prices has an official reason to show up.

A reader who can't afford new prices is still a reader.

Tags: PUBAT, Book Expo Thailand, secondhand books Thailand 2026