Bangkok's English Bookshops Are Vanishing, and We're Down to Two

By Andy — 2026-07-17 — English books Thailand expats

I walked into the Asia Books on Sukhumvit last week. It was half stationery shop now.

That's what happened to English books in Bangkok. Not suddenly, but definitely.

There was a time—and I mean within the last five or six years—when you could tell a serious English retail market existed here. Asia Books had more than twenty locations across the city stocked with actual novels. Actual variety. People moved to Bangkok, got off the BTS, and picked up a book on the way home. This is not ancient history. This is the recent past.

Then it all compressed.

The e-readers started winning. Online shopping became the path of least resistance. Expats scattered across Sukhumvit and those quiet residential sois north of the city center stopped browsing—they started ordering. One by one, Asia Books pulled the adult fiction and non-fiction sections back, shrinking them down to what amounts to a decorative shelf with three copies of whatever's currently on The Sunday Times bestseller list. Actually, that's not quite right. Sometimes there are only two copies. The shelves feel like an exercise in frustration now, which is a generous way to describe them.

This is not unique to Bangkok. Southeast Asia has already gone through this.

But Bangkok's English retail market was thin to begin with. When you're contracting from small, you vanish fast.

Kinokuniya at Siam Paragon is what won by default. The branch off Rama I Road—actually the one that matters—stocks English titles at prices something like thirty to a hundred baht below what Asia Books was asking for the same books. The stock is proper. You can browse. There's an EmQuartier location that handles overflow, and a smaller spot at Central World if you're desperate. But these are all one chain, one retailer, three shopping malls, as far as I can tell. The entire physical English-language book market for new books in this city now rests with a single Japanese company operating out of air-conditioned mall floors.

It's precarious.

The whole appeal of a physical bookshop is that you find the book you didn't know you wanted. Algorithms don't replicate that. Recommendation engines get the obvious ones right and miss everything interesting. When your only option is one chain across three identical shopping centers, serendipity stops happening. You get what you came looking for and nothing else. The book you would have discovered? It's nowhere.

Dasa Books is the other real option, and it operates on completely different terms. The shop's at 714/4 Sukhumvit Road—between Soi 26 and Soi 28—which is a five-minute walk from Phrom Phong BTS if you're moving at normal pace. They have more or less eighteen thousand secondhand titles across fiction, non-fiction, travel, history, things like that. There's a cafe where you can sit with a book before you commit to buying it. The whole inventory is listed in a spreadsheet they call the Dasabase, updated daily, which tells you they run the place like people who actually care.

Prices are fractions of what new books cost.

What's on the shelf depends on what Bangkok's departing expats dropped off that week. A banker moving back to London gives up his collection. A family returning to Australia clears space. You never know what you'll find. That unpredictability is why people go back. It's also why a visit can be disappointing if you're looking for something specific. The Dasabase helps—you can check before you travel—but discovery works differently with secondhand books.

Bookazine contracted too. Terminal 21, a few other spots. That was another small outlet handling the overflow.

Here's the honest version: Bangkok's physical English-language retail market was never large. The shift online made a small market smaller. If you arrived expecting something like Chiang Mai's secondhand scene—more eclectic, more surprising—Bangkok will disappoint you.

If you're settled here and buying new titles regularly, Kinokuniya at Siam Paragon is worth the trip. The stock justifies it. They have a Thai online store too if you want delivery. For used books, Dasa Books has no real competition. Check the Dasabase first, then go.

The market contracted. The two places that remain are good ones.

Tags: Kinokuniya, Dasa Books, English bookstores Bangkok expats