Bookstores in Phnom Penh

If you judge a town by its bookshops, Phnom Penh, Phnom Penh gives you 16 to judge by. That's 16 bookshops mapped around Phnom Penh, 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 Phnom Penh (within about 40 km), built from OpenStreetMap's community-maintained data. Names you'll run into include D's Books and Family Bookstore, plus Angkor Book store. If a bookshop's missing from Phnom Penh's list, it probably just hasn't been mapped yet.

The Phnom Penh bookstore lineup

16 mapped within about 40 km:

What the map tells us about bookstores in Phnom Penh

5 of the 16 list their opening hours on the map, which is genuinely useful — bookshops keep civilised hours, so the listed ones are usually reliable.

4 have websites listed. Worth a look for events — readings and signings get announced there first.

The Phnom Penh bookstore crawl

The efficient Phnom Penh bookstore crawl strings these together: D's Books, Family Bookstore, Angkor Book store, Seithakun Books on 148B Street 122, Open Book on វិថី ឧកញ៉ា ឈុន (២៤០), បណ្ណាគារ សេរីភាព ២ on 022 ផ្លូវ ២១០, បណ្ណាគារសេរីភាព ១ on 517 ផ្លូវ ១០៧, and បណ្ណាគារបាក់ទូក ២ — 16 stops, one logical order. 8 more are listed below.

Bookstore tips for Phnom Penh

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

• Look for local history at D's Books. The local-interest shelf tells you what a town thinks of itself. Great for visitors, better for new residents.
• Ask for the out-of-print hunters at Family Bookstore. Some used shops will hunt down out-of-print titles for you. It takes patience, but the find is worth it.
• Gift buying? Ask for wrapping. Many independents wrap beautifully and free. It beats a gift bag every time.
• Poetry lives in bookshops. Poetry barely exists online as a browsing experience. The poetry shelf in a real shop is a different world.

Good to know

We searched about 40 km around Phnom Penh — 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 Phnom Penh can take a while to appear. If you spot one of the 16 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 16 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.