Night Bookstores and Study Cafés: What Asian Cities Bet on Sleepless Reading Spaces

From America, on to Asia

Last time I wrote about the American-born Silent Book Club: no assigned book, no discussion, just people gathering to read their own books in silence — now more than 2,000 chapters in over 50 countries.

If America built a device for getting people into a room together, Asian cities offered something blunter: time.

Stay open until morning. Keep a seat available at three in the morning. Pay by the hour for a quiet desk. Taipei, Beijing, Seoul — several Asian cities have seriously tried to build places for reading and studying that simply never close.

Some of those attempts worked and some did not. Let us walk through them in order.

Taipei's Eslite — a quarter century without turning off the lights

Any account of Asia's night bookstores has to start in one place: the Dunnan branch of Eslite Bookstore in Taipei.

It opened in 1989 as Eslite's first store, moved into its final building in 1995, and began trading around the clock in 1999, with roughly 230,000 books on its shelves. In an era before online bookselling was everywhere, keeping a bookstore open all night was a genuinely bold call.

What made the store famous was less the opening hours than the scene they produced. Eslite never chased away the people sitting on the floor between the shelves to read. Late at night, a dozen people would be seated in the aisles with their own books open. Foreign media picked it up, and it became one of the images that stood for Taipei.

The first Eslite store opens

1989

The Dunnan building people remember dates from 1995

Round-the-clock trading begins

1999

Taiwan came to call it the bookstore that never closes

Books on the shelves at Dunnan

230,000

Alongside stationery, homeware and a food hall

Dunnan closed on 31 May 2020 for redevelopment, and the 24-hour baton passed to the Xinyi branch. Then Xinyi's own lease could not be renewed, and on 24 December 2023 it ended the roughly 18 years it had run since 2006.

On a weekend shortly before the closing, more than 50,000 visitors came through, with 53,000 on 16 December alone. The gap before the next store took over was bridged by the Nanxi branch, whose bookstore floor traded continuously for 28 days.

Then, on 20 January 2024, the Songyan branch inside the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park — a renovated tobacco factory — took over the round-the-clock bookstore floor. Its stock was tripled to match the old Dunnan store, and in 2026 Songyan still carries Taiwan's sleepless bookstore.

When the handover was announced, Eslite's chair Mercy Wu (Wu Min-jie) said something that stayed with me.

The capacity to digest text and the concentration that reading a printed book requires will gradually become a kind of special ability that a person can possess in the world to come.

A bookseller saying that in the age of AI. As a reason to keep trading through the night, it looks a long way ahead.

Beijing's Sanlian Taofen — the year a “midnight reading room” became national news

The store most strongly influenced by Eslite was Sanlian Taofen Bookstore in Beijing. Its general manager has described visiting Taiwan in 2008 and seeing the 24-hour Eslite: he wanted to try it, but the conditions were not there.

Those conditions arrived in 2014. Subway Line 6 opened and changed how people moved through the museum district; physical bookstores were exempted from the 13% value-added tax and cultural-industry subsidies became available. The tax exemption alone saved about a million yuan a year, and a cultural-industry grant added another million. With those two million yuan behind it, the store said, it finally had the confidence to trade around the clock.

The response outran anything the store had imagined. On the first Saturday after opening, 12 April, roughly 800 people came in after nine at night alone. Even by incomplete counts, night trading reached 360,000 yuan, and the press coverage lifted daytime sales by half again.

The decisive moment came on 22 April, when Premier Li Keqiang wrote to the staff. Offering readers a “midnight reading room,” he said, was an inventive attempt, and a sign that a fast-changing era needs inner composure.

May the 24-hour bookstore that never sleeps become a spiritual landmark for the city.

That line became a slogan for the bookselling trade across China. The next day, 23 April, the 24-hour store opened formally to coincide with World Book Day.

A notice on the wall reportedly read: on a late spring night, there is a desk and a lamp here, for you who love reading and thinking; stay as long as you like. Bookstores nationwide followed at once, and the 24-hour bookstore became a keyword of Chinese urban culture.

Why the 24-hour bookstore did not last

What follows is not a cheerful story.

Doubling your opening hours does not double your revenue. Obvious enough said out loud, but in practice the gap was punishing. Foot traffic peaks between six and ten in the evening, and after that almost nothing sells.

Chen Shaofeng, deputy dean of Peking University's Institute for Cultural Industries, said flatly that the 24-hour bookstore does not fit how an industry works. Trading between midnight and eight in the morning, in his view, is pointless.

If you spend a million yuan of operating cost to subsidise the needs of a few dozen readers, that is a kind of waste.

What is interesting is that Hao Dachao, Sanlian's general manager, did not argue back. He is right, he answered — only, that is purely the economic angle. What the sum cannot hold is what it means for someone coming off a night shift to find a bookstore still lit.

Most of the stores that followed nationwide closed at a loss or dropped the night hours. Sanlian itself gave up 24-hour trading at its Haidian branch, in the university district. The post-mortem was refreshingly direct: Sanlian's selection did not match what students were reading, since the shop carries neither exam guides nor self-help.

Taiwan was no different. Of the more than forty Eslite stores, only one could ever sustain round-the-clock trading. It needs a location where people are out at night: hotels, bars, expensive apartments. Even at Dunnan, books took only 20–30% of the floor area across five levels; the rest was stationery, clothing and food.

And the interesting part is that the demand booksellers could not make pay became an enormous market in another form.

Korea's study cafés — buying quiet by the hour

Korea has long had 독서실 (dokseosil), the reading room: a partitioned study space where exam candidates rent a desk by the month.

From around 2015 the reading room changed shape fast. Open seating without partitions, drinks allowed, interiors that look like cafés. Enter the 스터디카페 (study café).

The numbers are extreme. Analysing ten years of card payments, KB Kookmin Card found that study café merchants went from 112 at the end of 2015 to 6,944 at the end of October 2024 — about 62 times as many.

Study cafés at the end of 2015

112

Reading rooms were 96% of the category then

Study cafés at the end of October 2024

6,944

About 62-fold; the split flipped to 25% / 75%

Average monthly spend per person

49,000 won

People in their 20s 30%, 50s 30%, 40s 26%

In 2015 the split was 96% reading rooms to 4% study cafés; it has since inverted cleanly to 25% and 75%. Counting both formats, the country now has well over ten thousand of them — enough for saturation and closures to be a talking point.

What makes the study café different is that it needs nobody to run it. A kiosk and IoT access control let you book and pay for a seat from your phone while the operator checks entries remotely. With almost no staffing cost, unstaffed 24-hour trading works.

The problem that crushed Beijing's night bookstore — nothing sells after dark — Korea sidestepped structurally: do not sell books at all, sell time at a desk.

The user mix is the surprising part. By share of payments, people in their 20s account for 30%, people in their 50s for 30% and people in their 40s for 26%, at an average of about 49,000 won a month.

Which is to say the study café is no longer a place for exam candidates. Adults studying for professional qualifications, remote workers who cannot concentrate at home — they hold more than half the seats.

China's paid study rooms — the lead role went to working adults

The same phenomenon ran through China under the name 付费自习室 (paid study room).

Research tallies put Beijing first with about 596 outlets, followed by Xi'an with 533, Shanghai with 427 and Chengdu with 357. Users reached 7.55 million in 2022, and the count is expected to keep climbing.

Here too the shift in who shows up is telling. By 2023, ordinary office workers made up 42.5% while the student share had fallen sharply. Students have a campus library; working adults do not. So they pay for a quiet desk instead.

The late-night desks that bookstores in Taipei and Beijing had given away for free: that demand did not vanish. It was priced, and moved to a different business.

The study room inside the screen — Bilibili's study streams and Study with me

And there is one more night reading space that Asia produced. This one lives on a screen.

The Chinese video platform Bilibili has a genre that simply broadcasts studying. The streamer's face never appears. The camera is fixed above the desk, showing a textbook, a notebook and a timer. The soundtrack is white noise. It runs for hours.

Study livestreams started in 2018

1.03 million

Bilibili's tally for a single year

Total study streaming that year

1.46 million hours

The longest-running category on the platform

Share of Chinese paid study room users who are office workers

42.5%

As of 2023; the student share dropped sharply

In 2018 alone there were 1.03 million study streams totalling 1.46 million hours, making study the platform's longest-running category by airtime. Search after midnight and several study rooms are still live.

What a viewer does is simple. Prop the phone against the desk, open the stream, leave a line in the comments, and open your own textbook.

In Korea the same thing is called 공부방송 (study broadcast), or Study with me. A pen moving on paper, rain, a crackling fire — nothing but white noise gets through. The streamer does not talk and does not look at the camera. Hours of working hands, and that is all.

As for why it caught on, experts point to pandemic-era isolation and the wish to be connected to someone. What viewers get is vicarious satisfaction and motivation, and people who share the same ground gravitate to it.

Nobody sets homework and nobody teaches. There is simply footage of a person doing the same thing at the same time as you. Structurally it is startlingly close to the Silent Book Club from last time.

Japan's late-night bookstore came back unstaffed

So what about Japan? Tokyo once had a fair number of bookstores open into the night — Yamashita Shoten by Shibuya station, the Tsutayas around Shinjuku. Then the slump in publishing met the pandemic, and from early 2020 until February 2023 the only bookstore in the 23 wards near a station and open around the clock was Yamashita Shoten in Otsuka.

This is where it gets interesting. Japan's 24-hour bookstore has started coming back as unstaffed trading.

1. Yamashita Shoten, Setagaya (from 20 March 2023)Tohan's pilot of unstaffed night trading. Staffed from 10:00 to 19:00; from 19:00 to 10:00 the next morning, nobody is there. You register through LINE, scan the QR code beside the door to unlock it, and check out entirely self-service and cashless.
2. Bookman's Academy, Ota (from 16 January 2025)A bookstore in Ota, Gunma, that went to a staffed-and-unstaffed hybrid 24-hour model. Staff are present from 9:00 to 23:00; from 23:00 to 9:00 the store runs itself, on the same lineage of system as Setagaya.
3. Tomei Bookstore (from 11 April 2025)The bookstore the freee group runs in Kuramae. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are unstaffed all day; on other days it is staffed from 12:00 to 19:00 and unstaffed from 19:00 to noon. Add the two together and the shop is effectively open all day.
4. Aoi Shoten, Kasuga (from March 2026)Beside Kasuga station on the Toei Mita line. Staffed from 10:00 to 21:00, unstaffed from 21:00 until 10:00. Someone who logs Tokyo's 24-hour bookstores one by one lists it as this year's newest arrival.

The co-founder of the company behind the system describes the motive as not wanting the bookstores that enriched his life to disappear from the streets. Going unstaffed was chosen as a way to keep something, not to cut it.

The problem Beijing lamented — nothing sells at night — Korea solved by removing the staff. Japan's booksellers arrived at the same answer. But here an interesting inversion appears.

At Eslite in Taipei there were people reading on the floor and staff still tidying shelves at three in the morning. At Sanlian in Beijing there was a desk, a lamp and a note saying you could stay as long as you liked. Japan's 24-hour bookstore works precisely by subtracting human presence from those hours.

As efficiency, that is correct. But it is a slightly different thing from walking into a lit bookstore and finding someone there.

The feeling of being watched, and the feeling of company

The night spaces in this piece share one thing: someone else's presence is holding up your concentration.

But one thing separates them decisively from America's Silent Book Club: whether there is a goal.

Study cafés, paid study rooms, Study with me streams — at the centre of each sits an exam, a qualification, a job. The single line in a stream's comments saying you showed up again today is encouragement and a progress report at once.

Being seen as support and being seen as pressure sit astonishingly close together. The force that gets you to the desk because someone is watching flips straight into not being allowed to leave. When the stream ends and the screen goes dark, the company ends there too.

In that sense the people sitting on Eslite's floor were somewhere else entirely. No deadline, no quota. Someone who wants to read comes to a place that is open, reads as long as they like, and goes home. Mercy Wu's “special ability” is a remark about concentration itself, not about output.

Korea, in part one, went toward showing reading. America, in part two, went toward stripping communication away. Asia's night, this time, went toward handing over time.

One book in your hands, and the sound of a page turning

I love the time I spend reading, and I wanted that quiet presence somewhere in my ordinary days, so I have been building a reading space called mekuru on my own (there is an iPhone and iPad app too).

No progress reports, no completion charts, no social-media likes. Avatars simply sit down in the same room while each person quietly opens a book — a space made for paper books.

I cannot go to a Taipei bookstore every night, and I am not chased by the kind of deadline that would make me book a desk at a late-night study room. Even so, some days I want thirty quiet minutes of reading before bed.

Borrowing the faint sense of someone, somewhere, turning a page, and slowly opening the one book in my hands. I would like that small luxury to sit right next to an ordinary busy day.

This series travels through reading cultures country by country. Part four will look at library culture in the Nordic countries.