Buying books from Hong Kong/Taiwan

[joshuawbb]

I took a trip to Hong Kong with my girlfriend during the National Day holiday, discovering that for some reason I find the traditional top-to-bottom text reading of HK/Taiwanese/Japanese books a lot more comfortable on the eyes than left-to-right. I'm beginning to regret not bringing back more than a few books with me.

Does anyone know if there's a way to buy HK/Taiwan books online and have them shipped to the mainland? I've been looking around for a while and can't really find much of a solution to this. Taobao only seems to have titles that are unpublished in the mainland and my local Xiamen bookstore only keeps a very small, politically neutral selection of self-help titles. I've also tried eBay HK which seems to have a small selection but none of the books I'm looking for (e.g. the Taiwan version of Murakami's Norwegian Wood).

Aside from specific book sites, does anyone know what the Hong Kong or Taiwan equivalents of Amazon, eBay or Taobao might be? It's easy to find one or two English shopping sites set up specifically for English-speaking customers (and thus don't carry all that much), but that's not what I'm looking for. I've been looking but haven't had much luck. I don't suppose many will be able to ship to the mainland, but either way it would be nice to find information.

Many thanks for any suggestions

[gato]

I've ordered from Taiwan's Sanmin Online Bookstore before. The shipping charge to mainland wasn't too bad, though they were reluctant to ship any modern history books they thought might to be too sensitive (even history of Taiwan). You can also try Commercial Press Bookstore, if Sanmin doesn't work out, though I think Sanmin's prices should be much better.

Taiwan

http://www.sanmin.com.tw/

三民书店

Commercial Press Bookstore

http://www.cp1897.com.hk/

商務網上書店

[Kenny同志]

It's too bad that they don't provide any preview of the books, and that more than half of 三民 Bookstore's Chinese language books are in Simplified Chinese.

[skylee]

More and more books printed in HK use the left to right format (all the newspapers have adopted this format for years). Pity.

[character]

YesAsia's global site says they ship to the mainland. I've gotten some Traditional, top-to-bottom books from YesAsia.

[joshuawbb]

Fantastic, those were exactly what I was hoping for, looks like there are indeed ways to import HK/Taiwan books to here. Many thanks everyone!

I had a look at YesAsia before and thought their prices were always a bit high, but forgot that they still have that free shipping offer, that might make them cheaper than the other shops depending on the book. Good to see YesAsia still around, I used to buy Ayumi Hamasaki CDs from there back when I was 15.