About Us
The best coffee with free book-exchange. You can swap your purchased books free of change every time you come in for a drink.
Who we are?
Edge Cafe is a small, privately-owned coffee and book shop. It’s owned by an independent author and a team who have worked as English teachers. We’ve seen the general decline in literacy and wanted to do our part to encourage people to read and enjoy the vast and diverse benefits of reading. We don’t just talk about this as an abstract idea, we want to do something genuinely positive. So we did what we could to put books and novels affordably into the hands of people who want them.
Edge Cafe has some of the best coffee and drinks available at the lowest possible prices. We were set up and our staff were trained by the people behind Browns and Bread Talk. We source our beans from an independent roastery who puts quality before profits. We filter our water, we maintain our machine properly and we use the proper ingredients, all locally procured.
Our books are sourced primarily from England and include a wide and varied selection that will appeal across all interests and ages.
Ultimately, we want our children growing up surrounded by books, novels and intelligent discourse, not phone-screens and distractions. We think that’s better for everyone.
Free book exchange?
What kind of idiot let you swap their books for free? Edge Cafe – and that’s a special kind of idiot!
When you buy any book from us, you can return at any time for a coffee and swap it for free. Every time you come back for a drink, you can exchange any books, that you have purchased from us, for any other book we have in stock. If you can’t find anything you want, we’ll simply refund it, for the full price you paid.
All we ask is that you return the book in good condition so that other people can enjoy it and we ask that you leave the price sticker fully intact. Of course, we can only swap for books of the same value. In the event that you want to get a more expensive book, you can simply make up the difference and likewise, if the book is cheaper, we’ll refund the difference.
Why do we do this?
Many people will buy books from us that they want to keep and that money goes towards expanding our range so that we continue to have new and interesting things for you to choose from.
Those on a tighter budget can still enjoy reading and can do so without the risk. And for people who aren’t sure about the book they have chosen, they can take a chance without worrying about being stuck with a novel that has a terrible ending.
Our complete lack of business sense works very firmly in your favour.
What's the catch?
That’s a very cynical question and you should be genuinely ashamed of yourself for thinking it.
The biggest catch is that we’re very small and can’t give this the full-time attention that it probably deserves.
As a consequence of the nature of our business, updates to the stock are slow and not as frequent as we’d like them to be. We have struggled to get in good quality sci-fi, fantasy and horror as it hasn’t traditionally been popular in Cambodia. We get most of our stock shipping in from the UK but it’s expensive and slow.
For this reason we can’t advise customers on our current stock lists because we just don’t have an automated system that tracks these kinds of things. We operate as a second-hand bookshop and can only invite customers to come and have a look through our shelves in the hope of finding something that interests them.
We have a limited non-fiction section that has a large number of biographies and a children’s section with a good selection aimed at various ages. We have a small, but expanding, Khmer language section. The Khmer section is mostly new books but we have an arrangement with local publishers to take some of their over-stock which means we’re able to sell them at second-hand prices.
Another question we’ve been asked is how many times you can swap a book. The answer is that we don’t mind, we’d love you to come back often and read as many of our books as you want. You can swap books as many times as you like, we just ask you show our stock the due respect, return the books in good condition and leave our price-sticker attached as a reference.