The world’s largest bookstore is no longer a single shop in New York, Toronto or Portland. Two of the record holders of the 2000s closed in 2014: Barnes & Noble’s Fifth Avenue store, once listed by Guinness World Records as the largest bookstore by floor space, and Toronto’s aptly named World’s Biggest Bookstore. Today the largest bookstores are book cities: multi-storey complexes, mostly in China, built around bookselling but also housing cafés, exhibition spaces, theatres and offices.
That changes what “largest” means, so this list is explicit about it.
How this list is ranked. Stores are ranked by the floor area their owners or reliable reports publish. For the large complexes, that figure usually covers the whole building, not just the shelves; where a source separates out the bookselling area, we give it too. For single stores, the figure is the store itself. Stores with no reliable published figure are listed separately at the end rather than given a guessed place.
1. Shenzhen Book City Bay Area, Shenzhen, China
About 131,000 m² (about 1.4 million sq ft), whole building
Opened in late September 2025 in Shenzhen’s Bao’an district and known locally as the “Eye of the Bay Area”, this is the newest of Shenzhen’s book cities and, by building size, the largest bookstore anywhere. It spreads over two levels above ground and two below. Shenzhen Daily described it as set to become “the world’s largest brick-and-mortar bookstore”; no figure for the bookselling area alone has been published.
2. Shenzhen Book City Central, Shenzhen, China
82,000 m² building; 42,000 m² business area; about 20,000 m² for books and cultural goods
Opened in November 2006 in the Futian business district, Shenzhen’s central book city was for years described as the largest single-storey book mall in the world. It is a useful reminder of how much of a book city is not bookshelves: roughly a quarter of the building is given over to displaying and selling publications.
3. Tehran Book Garden, Iran
65,000 m² (about 700,000 sq ft), built area
Opened in 2017 within Tehran’s Abbasabad cultural district, the Book Garden was widely reported at the time as possibly the world’s biggest bookstore. Its 65,000 m² of indoor space covers bookshops together with galleries and theatres, on a site of 110,000 m².
4. Guangzhou Book Center, Guangzhou, China
About 18,000 m² (about 194,000 sq ft), business area
When it opened in Tianhe in November 1994, the Guangzhou Book Center was the largest bookstore in China and was hailed as the largest in the world, with 15,000 m² of book sales space. It has grown since, to a business area of about 18,000 m².
5. Shanghai Book City, Fuzhou Road, Shanghai, China
11,936 m² (about 128,500 sq ft), eight floors
Shanghai Book City stands on Fuzhou Road in the city centre. A renovation completed in 2023 reworked all eight floors, with around 10 kilometres of shelving.
6. Kyobo Book Centre Gangnam, Seoul, South Korea
11,900 m² (about 128,000 sq ft) when it opened
Opened in May 2003 beneath Kyobo Tower in Gangnam, this store was billed as the largest bookstore in South Korea. The figure is the size at opening.
7. Kyobo Book Centre Gwanghwamun, Seoul, South Korea
About 9,000 m² (about 97,000 sq ft)
Kyobo’s flagship, underground in central Seoul, was enlarged to about 9,000 m² in 1991 and holds around 2.3 million volumes.
8. Maruzen & Junkudo Umeda, Osaka, Japan
6,804 m² (73,000 sq ft) when it opened
When it opened in December 2010, this joint store of Maruzen and Junkudo was larger by floor space than any of the record holders in North America, including Powell’s. The figure is the size at opening.
9. Powell’s City of Books, Portland, Oregon, USA
About 6,300 m² (68,000 sq ft), retail floor
Powell’s occupies a full city block, with nine colour-coded rooms and more than 3,500 sections of new and used books. It describes itself as the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world.
10. Waterstones Piccadilly, London, UK
About 6,160 m² (66,317 sq ft)
Often called Europe’s largest bookshop, Waterstones’ London flagship spreads over six floors with more than eight miles of shelving and over 200,000 titles.
Also worth knowing
- Kinokuniya, The Dubai Mall, UAE. At 68,000 sq ft it was once among the largest bookstores in the world. It moved within the mall in 2017 to a space described only as “a bit smaller”, so it is not ranked here. When it reopened, it was described as the largest bookstore in the UAE.
- The Strand, New York, USA. Famous for “18 miles of books”, a slogan it has since outgrown: the store now holds about 23 miles, over three and a half floors. It publishes shelf length, not floor area.
- El Ateneo Grand Splendid, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Much smaller than the stores above, but often described as the most beautiful: a 1919 theatre converted into a bookstore in 2000.
Why the biggest bookstores are now in Asia
Eight of the ten largest bookstores by floor area are in Asia, and the top three are multi-purpose complexes that combine bookselling with exhibitions, performances and other cultural spaces. Meanwhile, two of North America’s record holders of the 2000s have closed. The largest Western stores on the list, Powell’s and Waterstones Piccadilly, are less than a tenth the size of either Shenzhen book city. For regional rankings, see our lists of the largest bookstores in America and the largest bookstores in Europe.
Sources
- Shenzhen Daily via Eyeshenzhen, “Eye of the Bay Area” (26 August 2025); Domus (29 September 2025)
- Shenzhen Book City Central: Wikipedia, citing Shenzhen municipal sources
- World Economic Forum, “Iran has opened possibly the world’s biggest bookstore” (July 2017)
- Guangzhou Book Center: Wikipedia
- Shanghai Book City renovation: Dsign Something (March 2024)
- Kyobo Book Centre: Wikipedia, citing Dong-a Ilbo (2002)
- Maruzen & Junkudo Umeda, Barnes & Noble Fifth Avenue and Toronto’s World’s Biggest Bookstore: Wikipedia, “World’s Biggest Bookstore”
- Powell’s Books: Wikipedia
- Waterstones Piccadilly: Cyril Leonard; Londonist (2016)
- Kinokuniya Dubai: Gulf News; The National (February 2017)
- Strand Bookstore: Wikipedia