Bookstores in Medan

If you judge a town by its bookshops, Medan, North Sumatra gives you 6 to judge by. That's 6 bookshops mapped around Medan, each with its own shelves and specialties. The used sections are where the real bargains hide. Staff picks shelves are the fastest way to read a shop's personality.

This guide covers every bookstore we could verify in and around Medan (within about 40 km), built from OpenStreetMap's community-maintained data. Names you'll run into include Kios Buku Jefri and Second Hand Books, plus Gramedia. If a bookshop's missing from Medan's list, it probably just hasn't been mapped yet.

The Medan bookstore lineup

6 mapped within about 40 km:

What the map tells us about bookstores in Medan

1 of the 6 list their opening hours on the map, which is genuinely useful — bookshops keep civilised hours, so the listed ones are usually reliable.

The Medan bookstore crawl

Making a day of it in Medan? Work this order: Kios Buku Jefri, Second Hand Books, Gramedia, Gramedia, Toko Buku Selecta on 3 Jalan Irian Barat, Gg. Buntu, Kecamatan Medan Timur,, and ATHA RIZQ BUKU on 10 Jalan Marquisa. That's the bookstore crawl in one sensible loop, no backtracking.

Bookstore tips for Medan

A few things worth knowing before you work through Medan's bookstores:

• Note the shop's specialties at Kios Buku Jefri. Sci-fi, travel, art books, philosophy — every good shop leans somewhere. Find the lean that matches yours.
• Ask about the book club discount at Second Hand Books. Many shops discount book-club orders. If your club buys local, everyone wins.
• Check the cookbook section. Cookbooks are the most browsed and least bought section, which means the used shelf is full of barely-touched gems.
• Learn your editions. A first edition, first printing is the collectible one. Booksellers will show you how to check the copyright page.

Good to know

We searched about 40 km around Medan — that covers the town itself plus the surrounding communities you'd reasonably drive to. Listings come from OpenStreetMap, mapped by local volunteers, so a brand-new bookstore in Medan can take a while to appear. If you spot one of the 6 that's closed, or a great bookstore we missed, the fix is to update the map itself — that's where this guide reads from.

We don't list prices — they change constantly and vary by edition. What we list is the where: real shops, verified by real mappers, in alphabetical order with no favourites.

If you run one of the 6 listed here and something's wrong — a closure, a move, new hours — the fix is the same: update the shop on OpenStreetMap and the correction flows through to this page on the next daily refresh.