Will International Book Bloggers please stand up?!

Hi y’all, Mitchii here, for those who doesn’t know me (which I think are a lot), and I’m an international Blogger. Our label sounds sophisticated right? Like some bookish ambassadors from foreign country. Haha, now that’s too much. *coughs* Anyway, I was asked before if it was hard to be an International Blogger. As you all know that my location somehow restricts me to engage in some bookish activities. Like how many of you were disappointed when you about to enter an amazing giveaway only to find out it is only open to US residents. Or you can join fun games in twitter because you’re fast asleep when the fun happened. And when a pub tells you they can’t grant you access to the galley you want because of ‘geographical restriction’. It sucks big time, right?

But before that, I was thinking, who International Bloggers really are? Is anyone outside of US, Canada, UK and Australia can be called International Bloggers? I mean US that’s given and UK (I think you can also include Australia here although I know they have local publishers there, too) and Canada has local branches. We in the country? I don’t think we have that. Not that we don’t have publishing companies here. My brother works for a publishing house although their forte is educational materials. Some publishing houses also publish local version of western books, although I’m not too sure if it clicks with the masses. I for one rather read the book in original version because I’m more comfortable reading in English.

So what’s like to be a Filipino Book Blogger? It’s fun. I still feel the same way as other bloggers. And while I miss some awesome things because of my location there were still stuff that compensates on the absence of such things. I do dream to attend events like BEA but we do have local version of that. Although books I want were not exactly abundant but at least we have events like it.

There’s no problem with the language. That’s the great thing about my country since English is one of our official languages. Almost everyone can speak and read English so we don’t really need translation. And I love reading the books as it is (so that’s also the reason why I don’t buy Filipino version books). Sometimes we also have the same release date as US (although most of the time we’re days and sometimes weeks behind).

We have two big bookstores here: National Bookstore and Fullybooked. There are also independent bookstores, too, although most of the books I have were from these two. And books here are hell lot cheaper. Compare to Australia, when I went there and bought books they were so expensive. I can buy two books here in a price of one there. Nope, not kidding. And then for books that are not available locally, I can purchase it online through Amazon and The Book Depository as they ship books to our country; although our Post Office sucks big time (I already have two cases of missing books). But they were great that I still got refund so no blood was spilled, LOL.

We also get to meet authors, huge thanks to local bookstores sponsoring such events. So yes, I’m still one lucky bookworm to still experience these awesome stuff. And there are many Filipino book bloggers and bookworms who enjoy the same books that I do. And it’s fun interacting with them. And with the help of internet, it bridges the gap between bloggers and bookworms around the globe. So if I think about it, it’s really not bad, not bad at all.   😀