Independent bookshops play a vital role in our communities – don't let Amazon destroy that

Extract from The Guardian

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Local bookshops are agents of culture not just commerce. They bring a sense of belonging to our suburbs and a passion for community Amazon can’t

Melbourne bookshop Readings’ managing director, Mark Rubbo, says bookshops help bind communities together and support local authors. Photograph: Readings

Mark Rubbo

Monday 20 November 2017 04.00 AEDT

What makes the place you live in your neighbourhood your home?
I’ve lived in inner-north Melbourne for most of my life. It’s home to a thriving arts scene: grass-roots theatre companies like La Mama, independent publishers like Scribe Publications and Black Inc., cultural institutions like Melbourne Museum.
But for the people who live and work here, what really makes my suburb feel like home is its vibrant blend of local businesses: fruiterers, delis, cafes,pubs, cinemas, butchers, bars and bookshops. Amazon’s arrival in Australia threatens the survival of this close-knit way of life we take for granted.
I’ve been the owner of one of those shops, Readings, for 45 years. I still love to work behind the counter, serving customers I’ve known for decades and meeting new generations of readers. And I love the fact that our seven shops – one of them managed by my son Joe – are just a few among 550 passionately run independent bookshops around Australia that are at the heart of their communities.

When publishers and authors from the UK and US visit – including regulars as diverse as Patti Smith and Alain de Botton – they’re amazed by how many independent bookshops Australia has. In the US, there were roughly 6,000 independent bookstores in the early 1990s. In 2017, there are just 2,321.
It’s probably not something we think about as we do our weekly shopping, but these shops play a crucial role in the very existence of the Australian writers we love to read. “Australian independent bookstores have for decades supported the unknown Australian writers, built the audience for books for us all,” wrote Man Booker Prize-winner Richard Flanagan in 2009.
In 1977, just one year after I and my partners bought Readings from its original owners (Ross and Dot Reading), Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, set in Carlton and Fitzroy, was published by our neighbours: fledgling independent publisher McPhee Gribble. An instant bestseller, it coincided with the start of a golden age in Australian literature; one that grew from a tight-knit community of writers, booksellers and publishers who nurtured, supported and inspired one another. In 1981, the first Vogel Literary Award was won by a young Tim Winton.
Such early successes formed the bedrock for the critically and commercially vibrant Australian book industry that has grown since, and still exists today. Integral was the willingness to invest in Australian writers, to support them as their talents are honed and their readerships grow. Tim Winton didn’t become the icon he is today until Cloudstreet, his fifth novel, was published in 1991. Christos Tsiolkas was a critically acclaimed star of 1990s “grunge-lit” with his debut Loaded in 1995; he became an international bestseller thirteen years and four novels later, with The Slap (2008).

Readings has also been there for the birth of treasured literary institutions like Melbourne Writers Festival – which evolved from Readings’ events program into a government-funded international festival – and The Stella Prize for Australian women writers, which grew out of a Readings event and held its first meetings at our head office.
“What makes me anxious is this sort of return to a centralizing of cultural power,” Winton told the New York Times earlier this year, responding to the opening of Amazon in Australia. “People who work in the book industry are agents of culture rather than just instruments of commerce.”
Bookshops – and all the shops that come together to make up our communities, to entice us away from our screens and into communal spaces – can’t exist without our customers. Where you shop is of course entirely your choice, but it’s important to really make that choice a conscious one.

Amazon opened its first bookstore in New York in May, marking the company’s highest-profile move into bricks-and-mortar retail in the US. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

In America, Amazon has dramatically changed communities: in the past 15 years, the number of local, independent retail businesses in the US dropped by 40% (measured relative to population). And according to some estimates it’s eliminated approximately 149,000 more retail jobs than it’s created in its warehouses.
Retail is Australia’s second-largest employer. There’s a real risk that Amazon Australia could decimate local businesses – and with them, part-time and casual jobs for students and parents of young children. Many writers, artists and musicians pay the rent by working in retail, too. We’ve employed many of them and still do (along with many career booksellers): our St Kilda bookseller Miles Allinson won a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript which became a novel then published by Scribe; and Leanne Hall, winner of this year’s Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature, has been one of our children’s literature specialists for ten years.
Australian independent bookshops give back to their communities in so many ways: through donations to the local school fete; through taking on high school students for work experience; through connecting readers with authors by hosting events, and connecting them with each other through book clubs.

Some go further. Suzy Wilson, owner of Riverbend Books in Brisbane, founded the incredible Indigenous Literacy Foundation: a national organisation that has supplied over 200,000 books to 250 remote communities, and published 66 books written by the Indigenous community, some in their first language. Thirty years ago, Readings began collecting donations via a charity tin in return for posting share-house accommodation ads in the window of our Carlton shop and, later, for gift wrapping. In 2009, that seed grew into the Readings Foundation, through which we donate 10% of our profits back to the community for projects in literacy and the arts. Since 2009, we’ve donated $1.2 million.
We know there are reasons why you might choose to buy books from Amazon. But there are also good reasons to support your local bookshop. History shows that community bookshops won’t always survive the arrival of Amazon in their home territory. So, please know that your choices will influence what your local community looks like in the years ahead. And that it might not, in the long-term, be possible to choose both global convenience and local experience.
Mark Rubbo is managing director of Readings, which will celebrate its fiftieth birthday in 2019