Cover Nazir Harith Fadzilah and Ainil Norazman outside the Tintabudi bookstore in Taman Tun Dr Ismail (Photo: Amru Shakir)
Nazir Harith Fadzilah and Ainil Norazman outside the Tintabudi bookstore in Taman Tun Dr Ismail (Photo: Amru Shakir)
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This year, independent bookstore Tintabudi turns ten in their most expansive space yet. We speak to Nazir Harith Fadzilah and Ainil Norazman to find out their vision for the next ten years
Over the last ten years, Tintabudi has been a slowly growing force in the local books scene. It started as a booth, bopping around in markets and art events. Then it found a home in a literal home in Ipoh, a haven of books (and also bed and breakfast). After some years, the big city called again and Tintabudi set up shop in a small space in Zhongshan Building. “We took up one small room. When we did reading programmes, with ten people it was already crowded,” Nazir Harith Fadzilah laughs.
After a few years, it was time for a new Tintabudi iteration, and this is the version you’ll find today at Taman Tun Dr Ismail. This version is positively sprawling compared to earlier spaces, drenched in sunlight, complete with a cafe and the biggest luxury: space for people to just sit and read.
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Above Tintabudi founder Nazir Harith Fadzilah
Tintabudi founder Nazir Harith Fadzilah
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This was an organic evolution, but also a highly considered one. Nazir had spent a year working in London, one of the book capitals of the world, and he came back with thoughts. “I worked a year in a bookshop in Charing Cross, that was my first experience of how the book industry was being run there,” he said. “When I came back to KL I thought, okay, this is the time to have the shop that I envisioned when I first started off. It has to be on the ground floor, it has to be near public transport. I wanted it to be a bookshop that served the community, it shouldn’t be in silo or out of the way. The community is the life and breath of a bookshop. I had always wanted to have a bookshop in TTDI, but back then we didn’t have the means—we had to build it, step by step.”
For those ten years, it wasn’t just Tintabudi’s physical space that evolved. Nazir has always applied a deeply personal curatorial instinct to Tintabudi’s shelves based on his interests—literary criticism, history, philosophy—but also an eagle-eyed observation of what people are talking about, what they’re readying, what is doing the rounds. “I am chronically online,” he says without a hint of irony. “I scour the web: what are people talking about? What books are they reading? What books do they find interesting?” Tintabudi had started from a simple enough impulse to fill a gap Nazir saw in the market, where his own reading needs were not being met, but as with the best of things, it soon turned into a full-fledged community project. “The customer became our sort of co-curator, because they also suggest us books. We ask people who come to the events, who come to our shows, our discussions, what sort of books that they might be interested in reading.”
Above Ainil Norazman, Tintabudi CEO
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If Nazir had shelf curation down to an art, the next step was for it to become a science. In 2025, Ainil Norazman joined Nazir as executive director at Tintabudi. “I was living in the US for the last 10 years, in a completely different world, doing tech and nothing to do with bookstores,” she tells us. “But I came back with the intention to ground myself back into what I had left 10 years ago. In the process of discovering that, I realised that in Malaysia there’s not a lot of space for you to do that meaningfully. I started exploring, one of my personal connections connected me to Tintabudi, and I came to an event. I started talking to Nazir, learned more about his intention and motivation behind the brand. And it just triggered something in me.”
Above The title curation at Tintabudi is driven by Nazir’s curatorial instincts and an interest in what the community is looking for
The title curation at Tintabudi is driven by Nazir’s curatorial instincts and an interest in what the community is looking for
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The meeting led to conversation, and conversation led to a new partnership. Nazir had organically grown a community space that he wanted to scale. Ainil was looking to ground herself after a decade working in tech. “My background was in intelligence systems. When I came in, I recognised that Nazir has got this really extraordinary curatorial instinct, because he has been doing this for 10 years, and he knows where to scour for data and context. How do I respect that instinct with the rigour that I have, which is more system-based?,” she says. “We are in the process of developing this internal capability which would take in a wide variety of sources from media, emerging conversations, discourse signals, culture signals and put them together. It will be able to inform us on what is going on in the world right now, locally and globally. A streamlined one-pager view of what people are talking about. And that will inform us on our curatorial direction, and how we navigate going forward.”
It’s an extraordinary resource for a neighbourhood bookstore to build, and one that signals Tintabudi’s ambitions, not just for themselves but for Malaysia’s reading culture at large. “I’m really interested in the way that knowledge moves, and a bookstore truly is the fundamental of that centre, right?” Ainil says. “It just takes on a more humane, social form. The way that I see Tintabudi too is that it’s not just a bookstore. We really want to become an epicentre where people think that this is where it's safe to learn, it’s safe to experience knowledge and to discover certain things. It's also very safe to voice out your opinions.”
At a time when attention spans are shrinking and AI content is proliferating, there’s a quiet sense of hope here—and it’s not a naive hope, but based on anecdotal evidence. “For the past ten years, what I’ve seen personally is a surge of younger people picking up books,” says Nazir. “Which is ironic because all of the signals say, ‘Oh, younger people don't read, younger people are too lazy, they rely on technology.’ But actually I think it’s a refuge for them. Books are physical objects that give them stability, because the texts aren’t moving, it’s printed, it’s set in stone. And it will always stay the same.”
“I don't think there’s ever a shortage of curious people. Malaysians, I think, are just as curious as anyone else in the world,” Ainil adds. “It’s just an access problem that we have to tackle from a perspective of: Okay, we need to understand what readers want, we need to meet them where they're at, as opposed to where we think they should be. We have been exploring that question a lot too, and it’s going to shape a lot of what we're thinking going forward.”
Credits
Photography: Amru Shakir
