A CITY FEELS incomplete without a bookshop. They are, at the very least, reminders of a shared humanity. If there’s anything left to believe in, it’s the veritable promise of a bookshop.

However, in the face of unthinkable horrors, many bookshops choose to do and say nothing, considering it outside their domain. This begs the question: what exactly is the domain of bookshops? Is it advocating for literature in a way that enriches the cultural sphere? Is it providing a real and imaginary refuge for the community? Or is it, as Luke Horton writes in Overland, to offer ‘a simulacrum of a world that we have already lost’?

A few years ago, I worked for a brief spell as a bookseller. I enjoyed it immensely. I became intimate with books in a way I may never be again; I spent all day shelving them, selling them, talking about them with customers and colleagues and, in the shop’s downtime, trawling interviews and articles about them on Lithub and Instagram.

Then, in a turn of events entirely at odds with the deeply pleasurable, bookish haze of those months, I was dismissed via email, and my window into a notoriously impenetrable world was latched. My case (which tested, for the first time, a new law that ensured employees could talk about their pay without fear of retribution) was just one of many – often unheard – cases. Most experiences of wage theft, unpaid hours, job precarity and unfair dismissal are silenced by the impervious stronghold of the book industry, except in careful whispers between booksellers. I did some media during that time. The messages I received from booksellers and publishing staff (some whom I knew, others I’d never met) all seemed to say the same thing: this voice you’ve been given is for all of us. I felt the collective injustice.

Folks outside the bookselling industry are often surprised to learn that booksellers aren’t immune to many of the exploitative conditions and job precarity experienced in other casualised workplaces. Most recently, just before Christmas 2025, workers from Harry Hartog and Berkelouw Books went on strike in protest of an outdated, twelve-year-old agreement that enforced unsustainable conditions such as below-minimum wages and no casual loading, penalty rates or part-time employment opportunities. These protestors were following in the footsteps of staff from Readings (Melbourne) and Better Read Than Dead (Sydney), who successfully negotiated Enterprise Bargaining Agreements – the first of their kind in Australia – in 2022.

After nearly seven years of working in Australia’s books and publishing industry, I’m still occasionally fooled by the illusion that art and art-adjacent things (such as prettily packaged and shelved books) represent, at worst, a kind of neutral good. But arts and cultural workplaces often deliberately cultivate an allure of prestige and bourgeois elitism that protects them from scrutiny. Add to this the fact that publishing and bookshop employees are overwhelmingly white and educated with advanced degrees from prestigious universities (and those in executive or management roles even more so). This demographic is often better positioned economically to sacrifice income, work overtime or trade penalty rates in exchange for more desirable, intellectually stimulating labour. But an acceptance of this trade-off – whether entered into willingly or (more often) not – undermines industrial action and erodes solidarity across class lines.

If you’ve seen the classic ’90s rom-com You’ve Got Mail, you’ll be familiar with the rivalry at its core: independent bookshop versus soulless chain. In the film, bookseller Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) owns The Shop Around the Corner. Kathleen is pitted against Joe Fox (Tom Hanks), whose department bookstore, Fox Books, is set to put Kathleen’s family-run shop out of business. Blissfully unaware of each other’s true identities, they fall in love over an anonymous exchange of emails. While Fox Books is the villain, that doesn’t necessarily mean The Shop Around the Corner is the hero. Nevertheless, the film does a very good job selling the innocence of small bookshops as cultural and community stalwarts worthy of preservation.

In ‘Paying to Play’, Laura Elizabeth Woollett considers the tension between being a small business and being, or facilitating, a community. She writes:

Business is not community service, but it’s tempting to confuse the two when the same constituency of readers and writers is the source of one’s livelihood and sense of belonging. But what’s harder to stomach is the deliberate obfuscation…the way ‘building a community’ can mean both establishing a business and a deflection of professional responsibility; the way business-related communications can become ‘private’ if their contents disrupt the illusion of community. 

The relationship between employer and employee is, and always will be, an unequal one: one group holds the power and the other does not. But you don’t have to look very far to find instances of employers weaponising their protected status in the community in attempts to obfuscate this fact. As Benjamin Clark argues in ‘The Battle to Unionise Bookshops’,‘Leveraging an organisation’s prestige is a common employer tactic to stifle dissent.’

In these spaces where profit margins are small and booksellers are expected to be grateful for the opportunity to work among their favourite books and authors, proper protections and compensation are difficult to enforce without union intervention. Management often use the bottom line to justify wage freezes, wage theft and so on, but when staff unionise or go on strike – when there are real consequences to disenfranchisement – bookshops are quick to remind the public of their importance in the community and cultural sphere, as in Mark Rubbo’s 2022 response to author solidarity with Readings booksellers.

I’ve noticed, too, that management across many workplaces, not just bookshops, encourage their staff to view the workplace as ‘a family’. They deliberately distort the relational component of the work to sell the idea that everybody has a shared stake in the success or failure of the business – when the reality is the opposite. Perhaps because of the fact that bookshop communities of staff, loyal customers and local authors are often tight-knit and interconnected, this tactic is all the more effective. This double standard deals both in the hard logics of capitalism and, when it’s convenient, in the far murkier domain of social connection and belonging: what we owe to one another.

INDEPENDENT BOOKSHOPS WERE – and still are – a symbol of affluence and bourgeois values. The bookshop owner’s job, if they are interested in keeping their doors open, is to cater to the interests and tastes of the elite. A highly curated selection of books displayed in thoughtful ways de-emphasises mass consumerism and tastes. While Barnes and Noble make big money selling books like toothpaste, independent bookshops make a profit by tapping into bourgeois values and sensibilities. In this context, buying decisions, not to mention the way owners manage the business and treat staff, matter only insofar as they serve (to protect) the status of the bookshop among its elite clientele.

Reading and books sustain life. They feed the most fundamental of human needs: belonging, freedom, love. But independent bookshops, with their curated displays, theatrical interiors and highly refined experiences, estrange books from the words inside them. It is in this chasm that bookshop owners are able to exploit workers, cultivate benign or problematic politics, and recover so quickly from a blanched reputation.

In 2024, Susanne Horman, owner and chief executive of Robinsons Bookshop, shared (and then deleted) an appalling poston social media that called for more ‘kids picture books with just white kids on the cover’ and fewer books promoting diversity. She was, of course, widely criticised. Not a single person agreed with her publicly. But both Robinsons (which makes, reportedly, an estimated $6.6 million in annual revenue) and Horman (who is still the owner) survived the ordeal without, it seems, any significant or long-term cost to the business. 

In Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the culture of consumption, Laura J Miller argues that bookshops wield ‘extra-commercial status’. I would add to this that they are also broadly given political hall passes. We expect them, and even need them, to be dependably extra-political – a blank page (oh the irony). As well-trained consumers, our need, our desideratum, is a self-referential one. We want to go into a bookshop and see ourselves. In this context, books by or about vulnerable, oppressed and marginalised folks are commodified by an insatiable bourgeois desire. This perpetually upholds the hegemony of bourgeois values and positions them at the centre of knowledge. Horman’s troubling comments are no aberration; they expose a deep-seated fear of radical change and the fragility of power.

This isn’t to say that bookshops don’t have any positive contributions to make, or that they can’t have an important role to play in dismantling or challenging the status quo. The strength of solidarity between booksellers and the wider community of readers and authors – and the resulting industrial action – makes it clear that they can and do. There are also examples of independent bookshops risking their bottom line to take a stand (in San Francisco, for example, a small bookshop made the decision not to carry any books by vocal TERF and Harry Potter author JK Rowling); bookshops such as Melbourne’s Amplify Bookstore are political forces in and of themselves.

As the arts and cultural sector in Australia is increasingly starved of funding, and our political leaders openly endorse the policing of arts organisations, the contributions of truly staunch creative institutions and spaces that use their platform to agitate and provide refuge from anti-democratic forces become crucial. 

Bookshops, and their owners and booksellers, are treasured pillars of the community – almost unanimously so. Because of this, when criticism, unionising or financial strain pose a threat, the local media and community who support the bookshop are primed to react protectively – or at least turn a blind eye. The 2024 sale of the building that houses Melbourne’s Hill of Content Bookshop was widely reported on. Many reports expressed fears that the new owners would not renew the lease on the bookshop, thus requiring Hill of Content to close or move (which they eventually did). On the day of Hill of Content’s relocation, a visually striking ‘human chain’ passed books from the old location to the new one, proving that bookshops can effectively stir communities into action. 

Far from being a simulacrum, bookshops offer us so much. When done right, their domain is one of infinite promise: confirmation of one’s importance in the community, a home for writing, that life-sustaining stuff, a force for change. But without radical transformation, they’re the most impervious of ivory towers. The stakes are high, and the onus of responsibility is on bookshops to use their cultural capital and influence responsibly.

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