11.02.11

Looking for books in English in Amsterdam

Today I was looking for a present for my master thesis' supervisor. I wanted to buy her a book, so that involved visiting different bookshops here in Amsterdam. Here is a short summary of the bookshops in English I mostly visit. If you know some more, feel free to comment the blogpost!

  • New English Bookstore - that's the one I visit the most. Comparing with other bookshops, it has the best prices, you can often find good books for around 5 euro! On the other side, the bookshop is not so huge as some others, so the variety of books is limited. Also bear in mind that you should have cash with you, because quite often the credit card machine not working.
  • American Book Center - huge! It has several floors and all the books are sorted in various topics, so you can find pretty much everything there. As I was looking for books about the Netherlands, I noticed that ABC has the biggest choice - several shelves were dedicated to books about living in the Netherlands, getting to know Dutch culture etc. It is not so cheap as New English Bookstore, but in general the prices in ABC are the same as all other bookstores in Amsterdam I have seen.
  • Waterstones - I have been to this one only twice, but already noticed that it's quite big as well. It seems to be British version of ABC. They have a very nice tradition of posting the readers' reviews about the books next to the books - so you can read what somebody else has said about the book before deciding if you want to buy it or no. Alternatively, you can also leave your own comments.
Of course, there are also shelves dedicated to books in English in the regular Dutch bookshops such as Selexyz. There are also some smaller bookshops in English, but I haven't been to them enough to comment.

Conclusion - I still prefer going to second hand bookshops in London and remember the wonderful bookshop in Toronto where the books were amazingly cheap and which also claimed to be the biggest bookshop in the world. Ah, buying books in countries where the first language is English still is the best!

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