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Australia’s Amazon Book Battle

Mark Rubbo, the co-owner of Readings, serves a customer purchasing a book at the shop earlier this month.Credit...Asanka Brendon Ratnayake for The New York Times

MELBOURNE, Australia — When Borders opened in 2002 across the street from Readings, Melbourne’s best-known independent bookseller, retail experts predicted catastrophe for the musty old shop competing with the shiny new chain store.

Instead, Australians rejected Borders right into bankruptcy.

Starbucks has also failed miserably here in a country where cafe loyalty is king. And when it comes to Amazon, which has announced it will open its warehouse-based online sales juggernaut soon in Australia, many book-loving Australians are not shy about hoping for another epitaph.

“I want to beat them,” said Mark Rubbo, Readings’ co-owner, discussing Amazon as he stared across Lygon Street to where Borders used to be. “I don’t like the idea of this monolith devouring everything.”

How much of the world’s shopping habits Amazon will control worldwide is a question confronting retailers of all kinds. The “everything store,” as the site is known, now stocks roughly 400 million products, from toothpaste and televisions to sex toys, and several Australian retail chains have already seen their stock prices decline since Amazon announced its plans in April.

But changing Australians’ reading habits may be more of a challenge. Books are bellwethers of great symbolic weight, not just because they were Amazon’s first product and because the company often uses them to wedge itself into new markets, but also because books and bookstores are tightly linked to Australia’s sense of itself, and to the country’s beloved ecosystem of local commerce.

You know all those bespoke experiences that American urbanites have been reviving: the artisanal butcher and barber shops, the gourmet grocer and the community bookstore? In Australia, though weakened by shopping centers, they never really died.

This is still a place where many Australians can buy a novel, sausages and shampoo in three different shops, each owned by a neighbor with children at the local school.

Big box stores are rare and independent bookstores are strong: Their sales accounted for around 26 percent of Australia’s book business in 2015, according to Nielsen, up from 20 percent in the late 2000s, more than double the share for independents in the United States.

Romantics (and some booksellers) argue that Australians simply favor local offerings. Cynics (and some economists) argue that many Australians are just wealthy and complacent, unfamiliar with more convenient alternatives that they’ll eventually embrace and come to love.

Regardless, this much is clear: Amazon’s arrival is a stress test not just for individual retail categories but also for Australia’s own writing, and way of life.

“Our culture is, and all cultures are, being swamped by outside influences,” Mr. Rubbo said. “We’re fighting to defend our voice.”

Amazon’s first “fulfillment center” in Australia sits at the intersection of several highways about an hour south of central Melbourne. There are food companies and warehouses for Penguin Random House nearby, and inside, room for millions of products.

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The entrance of Australia’s first Amazon fulfillment center in the Melbourne industrial suburb of South Dandenong.Credit...Asanka Brendon Ratnayake for The New York Times

Union organizers say they are watching the location closely to ensure that new hires receive Australia’s minimum wage of roughly 18 Australian dollars, around $14.50. But on a recent visit, the warehouse was empty except for a few gray shelves in the middle of a gray floor. The only employees were construction workers clad in neon-green and finishing a bathroom.

What comes next is anyone’s guess. Amazon turned down requests for an interview, and did not respond to emails with specific questions.

The company is known for this sort of thing, preferring buzz to transparency, and here in Australia, that’s led to excitement for many who are hoping for an easier, much broader online shopping experience — along with real estate speculation in the warehouse market, the rollout of a new free delivery service by Australia’s postal service, and what the chief executive at one large retailing conglomerate described as “a healthy sense of paranoia.”

Booksellers know the feeling. Amazon hasn’t explained why it’s taken so long to bring its full retail operation to Australia but Australians have been able to order from Amazon’s American site for years and even with shipping costs, book prices are often equal to or cheaper than what can be found in Sydney or Melbourne.

There are other digital booksellers already in Australia too, including Book Depository, an Amazon subsidiary from Britain, and Booktopia, a start-up that nearly went public last year.

Tony Nash, the chief executive of Booktopia, which according to the company, controls about 4 percent of Australia’s book market, said that Amazon has already made everyone more competitive.

Booktopia, for example, now uses conveyors, automatic packing machines and a staff of 150 people to get books into customers’ hands, in some cases on the same day they’re ordered.

“It’s not about price,” Mr. Nash said. Especially in countries with small widely dispersed populations like Canada and Australia, where 24 million people are spread across a continent the size of the United States, “it’s about the logistics.”

But isolation, as Australians know better than most, can help and hurt.

Sean Guy, a manager at The Bookshop in Darwin, Australia’s northernmost major city, said if he lived in a more isolated community like Alice Springs, in the nation’s interior desert region, “I’d probably find it a lot easier to go online for five minutes than call the local bookshop.”

For most everyone else, he added, bricks-and-books still work.

“You’ll never be able to beat the prices of Amazon, but you can save on time by going into a store,” he said. “And people like supporting local businesses.”

Australians already buy more books per capita than Americans (based on Nielsen sales figures) and spend more hours reading.

Michael Heyward, the publisher at Text, an independent publisher with a mix of new and established Australian writers, including Helen Garner, said that maybe Australia’s built up enough independence to live with Amazon in peace.

“I would like to believe we can have our cake and eat it,” he said in an interview at his office in Melbourne.

But just below his own bookish calm — and the not-so-secret hope that Amazon will help sell more books — there are wider concerns.

“Let’s not outsource our minds to the narcissism of the global algorithm,” warned Anna Funder, the author of “Stasiland” and “All That I Am,” at a booksellers conference last year. And she’s not alone.

“People who work in the book industry are agents of culture rather than just instruments of commerce,” said Tim Winton, the author of Australian classics like “Cloudstreet,” and one of Australia’s best-known writers. “When you take away their role as agents of culture and reduce them to instruments of capitalism, it changes the dynamic.”

In interviews with more than a dozen booksellers, authors, independent publishers and lawyers specializing in copyright, two worst-case scenarios emerged.

One, widely considered the more likely, involves Amazon convincing Australia’s big publishers to provide steep discounts and promises of faster delivery, driving down prices and author royalties for all books, and possibly putting independent booksellers’ orders at the end of the line.

“Amazon controls the negotiating process,” said David Gaunt, the co-owner of Gleebooks in Sydney. “If they choose to sell the new Richard Flanagan book at $9.99,” he added, referring to Australia’s last winner of the Man Booker Prize, who has a new novel out, “we’ll sell none.”

The second nightmare scenario, according to booksellers and authors, is that Amazon will find a way to tilt Australia’s labor, tax and import laws in its favor.

Stock grants for employees could be used to decrease tax liability, as Amazon has done in Europe. What else Amazon might do is a question lawyers and consultants are already gaming out, while lobbying the Australian government, which at this point seems determined to protect its own.

Starting in July, a new digital services tax will be levied on all online purchases of 1,000 Australian dollars, or roughly $780, or less. Netflix, eBay and Amazon will all be affected.

Australian lawmakers have also resisted calls from economists on the government’s own Productivity Commission to eliminate the country’s parallel import restrictions. The rules essentially give Australian publishers a national monopoly over any book they publish. Booksellers are not allowed to import books from another country if the book has been published by an Australian copyright holder within 30 days of overseas release and if the Australian publisher can supply the book within 90 days.

Critics say the rules are protectionist, and a cause of overpriced books.

But these restrictions, copyright lawyers say, should keep Amazon from stocking its warehouses with cheaper books shipped in from abroad. And they are widely seen by authors as the foundation of Australia’s literary culture.

The copyright law that went into effect in May 1969 essentially created a protected market in a country that, until then, had relied almost entirely on Britain for its books.

Now, many authors say, any effort to soften the rules or let Amazon skirt them would weaken local publishers, reduce royalty rates and return Australia to a reliance on outsiders who may not care to publish the array of Australian authors now in circulation.

“What makes me anxious is this sort of return to a centralizing of cultural power,” said Mr. Winton, who has published more than two dozen books for adults and children. For Australia, he said, Amazon may represent a step backward: “It’s a retrograde move.”

Inside the Readings flagship store on Lygon Street, Australian authors get prominent displays on front tables and on the first shelves people see.

At Riverbend Books in Brisbane, another independent bookseller well known to publishers and authors, roughly 60 percent of the books are written by Australians.

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A customer reading a book at Readings bookshop in the Carlton suburb of Melbourne.Credit...Asanka Brendon Ratnayake for The New York Times

Would Amazon give local authors the same level of promotion? Will it publish and print its own books in Australia or make sellers of used books more dominant? Will it undermine or compete with the community ethos that bookstores like Readings represent?

“We have a lot of questions,” said Mr. Rubbo, 69, a quiet, casual man with intense blue eyes who has expanded Readings to seven locations in and around Melbourne over the past 41 years.

He said that since the arrival of Borders in 2002, Readings and many other bookstores have strengthened their bonds with local authors and readers. Events are now the norm; Readings will do 260 this year alone.

The strongest independent bookstores, while maintaining a 1990s feel at times, complete with racks of music CDs, are also linked up with universities and schools and Australia’s well-known writers festivals in Sydney, Melbourne and elsewhere.

Many customers, while open to buying some items from Amazon, seem pleased with the status quo for books. “I like seeing the physical book itself, and the chance to find things you wouldn’t find otherwise,” said Sonya Theys, 24, who was browsing at Readings one recent evening.

Authors are even more zealous. “If literature is a religion, the bookstore is the church,” said Alec Patric, an award-winning novelist who also happens to work at Readings. “It’s a delicate equilibrium.”

Amazon’s deals with publishers could upset all of that. Mr. Rubbo said he has pressed them to keep the playing field even, to not give Amazon any special treatment with delivery time or price.

Suzy Wilson, the owner of Riverbend, has made the same case to major Australian publishers. She said she was told not to fret. “They were giving me a bit of a pep talk really,” she said.

But as negotiations between Amazon and local publishers continue, the major players are staying silent. Penguin Random House and Hachette turned down requests for comment. Michael Gordon-Smith, the chief executive of the Australian Publishers Association, sent a statement by email: “We welcome any new ways to get books to Australian readers and any new investment in the Australian industry that is consistent with good corporate citizenship and respect for creators’ rights.”

Ms. Wilson and Mr. Rubbo both said that Amazon’s power could bend the will of even the well-intentioned. In their nightmares, they see declining revenues, shuttered stores and silent, dying neighborhoods.

“It’s really crucial that these places survive and thrive,” Ms. Wilson said. “I wish I was more optimistic.”

Tacey Rychter contributed reporting from Sydney.

Follow New York Times Books on Facebook and Twitter (@nytimesbooks), and sign up for our newsletter. Follow Damien Cave on Twitter: @damiencave.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section BU, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Australia Braces for Amazon Book Battle. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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