ble without it.” That insistence on presence has outlasted several waves of retail thinking. The shop first opened in 1975 by Ray Jelfs and Tony Gallagher and expanded to selling new books under Roger Mackell and Gaunt, who joined in 1978. Over time, the shop grew and became an intellectual anchor for the area, attracting students, academics, and readers. Its eventual move to 49 Glebe Point Road and the renovations of the early 1990s, supported by the Glebe Society and local council, preserved the building and the sensibility of the space. Today, Gleebooks operates across three locations and has been the bookseller for the Sydney Writers’ Festival for more than two decades. It is, on paper, a small retail operation, but in practice it relies on a myriad of mechanics: knowledgeable staff, author events, book clubs, and browsing that doesn’t follow a fixed path. What a bookseller knows that a feed doesn’t The broader context is a market under pressure but, optimistically, far from collapse. According to IBISWorld, Australia’s book retail industry generates around $1.6–$1.7 billion in annual revenue, with modest declines over recent years reflecting both digital competition and changing consumer habits. In many cases, these stores are instrumental in shaping taste, influencing what readers encounter and in Gleebook’s case, sustaining local literary economies. For Susannah Bowen, CEO of the Australian Booksellers Association, the case for bookshops is both cultural and economic and far more substantial than their modest footprint might suggest. “Bookshops are amazing,” Bowen told Inside Retail. “They drive literacy and passion for reading, they function as community gathering spaces that enable social connection, they sustain Australian stories, and they create knowledge economy jobs. They are doing a lot of heavy lifting for culture and education.”  It is, she said, a sector often underestimated. “Australian bookshops are in a stronger position than many people realise, proportionally healthier than in other English-speaking markets. That said, local bookshops face unprecedented pressure from global giants and discount department stores.” What sustains them, she points to, is experience, the dense, human texture of the store itself. “Many bookshops run events including author launches, book clubs, reading groups, games and D&D nights, the list goes on. That can’t be replicated online.” Sydney has long reflected the camaraderie of the bookshop, once home to more than 100 bookshops in the CBD alone, writer Vanessa Berry reflected in a recent ABC Radio Sydney interview, before rising rents and redevelopment began to reshape the city’s retail core. Bookstores, however, have merely been redistributed, moving into suburban strips and neighbourhood precincts where they can operate with greater flexibility. Stores, she argues, are still full of people and very popular.  Why people stay longer than they plan to Dymocks’ George Street flagship, with its mezzanine café overlooking the shop floor, demonstrates how bookstores can function as destinations, encouraging customers to linger rather than transact quickly. Independent operators have taken a different path, focusing on curation and community. Gleebooks has long exemplified this approach, while Berkelouw Books has built a multi-generational appeal through heritage, second-hand offerings and layered retail environments. In Paddington, Romancing the Novel has built a store around romance fiction and is cultivating a highly engaged community. Owner Scarlett Hopper told Inside Retail she has always been a romance reader and author, so it came naturally to her to create a space centred on it. “It has become so much more than just a quick pit stop in the day. It’s a destination and community unlike anything I’ve personally experienced. I wanted to create a safe space, especially for women, where our love of reading and love stories are celebrated and cherished,” she said. “We have weekly events like book clubs, craft nights, and author signings where dozens of us come together and lean into the joy this community brings.”  Rising rents, labour costs and the steady pull of online retail have made bookselling a difficult business to run, particularly with the arduous task of competing on price or scale. For the notable booksellers, the response has been to resist that logic rather than adapt to it. The shop continues to run alongside a dense calendar of author events, festival tie-ins and in-store activity. It is not a streamlined operation, nor is it designed to be, and yet it holds. Customers return, ask questions and come back again to a store that is not disappearing any time soon.