tl;dr: Buy books on TaoBao, browse books at Eslite.

Longer tldr

Browsing: Eslite Causeway Bay / Tsim Sha Tsui are complete with neat collections but not great seating. Hong Kong Central Library has more books in worse condition, and worse environment, but more seats. Shenzhen Library has less classics but the environment is more pleasing than HK’s.

Purchasing: Taobao dominates especially older titles. Otherwise look into Elephants HK. You might get some copy-right expired books for the cheap in mainland bookstores, but Taobao would most likely still be cheaper.

Errata

  • Generally I think English classics is a pretty good proxy for overall English holdings.
  • Fundamentally, I think the strategy is to buy any longer classics on Taobao and borrow the rest from HK libraries.
  • Taobao’s pricing schemes are generally quite predatory and takes some time to get used to. Always pay notice to the final bill.
  • The markup in Eslite is generally 30%-50%. You’ll not get newly released English books in mainland bookstores or Taobao for that much cheaper.
  • You get to use free Wifi if you register as a reader in Shenzhen library. It’s the only place I’ve been to where I can use free public wifi without a mainland phone number.
  • You only get to borrow 1-2 non-chinese books in Shenzhen libraries compared to 10 in HK libraries.
  • HK libraries have a disproportionately high (and duplicative) collection of Shakespeare, poetry and biographies in my view.
  • You can pay HKD3.3 to get any book in the HK libraries system delivered to your local library. It’s best to browse in Central Library though.
  • For HK libaries, you can renew books 5 times, each time extending the lease for 14 days. It’s not really enough for long classics in my view.
  • You can generally get last year’s best books of the year in HK libraries.
  • Not worth much effort optimising all this, but it was personally interesting since it helped me develop an understanding of what people generally read in what places. Eslite bookstores always have an display of their best-selling books at the moment which is super informative.