It is late night on a Saturday and the floor is packed. On one side, two female fashion models huddle together, whispering. Across the room, a group of men cast furtive glances at other patrons from a raised platform.
Quiet, please. This is no dance club. That is so Hong Kong. So New York.
In Taipei, Taiwan, the cool people are at the Eslite Bookstore on Dunhua South Road, open 24 hours a day.
Lena Lin, 28, is one of the models. She is sitting on the floor, reading a translation of Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In.” Next to her is her friend Esther Yang, 27, skimming through a Chinese version of “Notes on Directing” by Frank Hauser and Russell Reich. The bookstore has a longstanding policy: Stay as long as you like, read as much as you want, just don’t spill coffee on the books. Catnaps are fine. No purchase necessary.
But purchase they do. At a time when many bookstores in the United States are struggling in the face of an onslaught from the online retailer Amazon, Eslite is thriving. It has 43 stores in Taiwan and one in Hong Kong. The company has plans to open two branches in mainland China this year, in Shanghai and Suzhou. Sales rose more than 15 percent in 2013 in its listed arm, and profits are rising as well.
One secret to Eslite’s success is that it is far more than a bookstore. While the Borders chain, now defunct, in the United States featured coffee shops, Eslite stores are more like self-contained shopping malls. About 60 percent of sales come from books. The rest comes from items like food, kitchenware, music, wine, jewelry, watches, movies, toys — sold in shops interspersed throughout the bookstores. One branch in Taipei has a movie theater.
Another reason for its success is the character of the city where the company was founded in 1989. As in many Asian cities, people work late into the night, and a company survey in 1999 suggested that many people would frequent a 24-hour bookstore. The busiest time for the bookstore is between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., according to Timothy Wang, a company spokesman.
“People really wanted to come read books late at night,” Mr. Wang said in a telephone interview. “Some young travelers who can’t find a hotel bring their baggage and settle down in the bookstore. They feel that the environment at Eslite is really peaceful.”
Other branches close at night. When Eslite — Mr. Wang says it means elite in Old French — opened its Hong Kong store in 2012 in the Causeway Bay shopping district, it initially stayed open for 24 hours but quickly moved away from that format. The company’s founder, Robert Wu Ching-yu, was quoted in the South China Morning Post at the time as saying, “Running a bookstore in Hong Kong, I believe, requires a little more shrewdness and a little less romance.”
There is little romance in the Hong Kong store, sandwiched as it is between food courts and clothing stores on three floors of a high-rise shopping mall.
The romance is in Taiwan. Mr. Wang believes that in Taipei, people crave the human interactions that can happen at bookstores, something that might be absent in office environments. They also might be seeking an escape from family squabbles at home, or even looking for love, he said.
Ms. Lin has another theory.
“In Taipei, there’s nowhere to go actually,” Ms. Lin said. “Taipei is really small, so when we have no idea where to go, we just come to Chengpin,” she said, referring to the store by its Chinese name.
The Dunhua South store in Taipei is also a magnet for visitors from mainland China, where publishing, like movies and television shows, is highly censored by the governing Communist Party.
The men on the raised platform? They are browsing the politics section, brimming with Chinese-language titles banned on the mainland, including “Tombstone,” Yang Jisheng’s account of the devastating famine in China during the late 1950s and early 1960s; “No Enemies, No Hatred,” a collection of essays and poems by Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner; and several titles about the events in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989.
One man from Anhui Province, China, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the Chinese authorities keep a close eye on visitors to Taiwan, was heading to the cash register to buy “The Private Life of Chairman Mao” by Li Zhisui, along with books on poetry and calligraphy. It was his first trip to Taiwan.
“This is really interesting,” he said.
At 11 p.m., the checkout line was about 20 people deep.
By that time, Ms. Lin and Ms. Yang had already been at Eslite for four hours. They started with dinner in the bookstore’s food court, bought a calendar, then went upstairs to read.
“People in Taiwan, particularly in Taipei, are really calm. They really like to read books,” Ms. Yang said. “This is entertainment for us.”
