Another bookshop in Canberra has closed, and it's barely a blip in the news.
Except that this one began in Canberra, became a chain of dozens of stores across the country, and has now shifted almost entirely online.
The Book Grocer, the remainders and second-hand book retailer, has just closed its Canberra outlet at Majura Park.
There are now only four left - three in Melbourne and one in Newcastle - but owner and book-lover extraordinaire Karl Slotte says business has never been better, with bricks and mortar stores out of the second-hand book equation.
It began as Castlebooks in Kingston in 2000 - still the name of the wholesale arm - and changed to The Book Grocer in 2007.
Since then, Mr Slotte, along with his wife Jen Slotte and brother-in-law Tony Sidebottom, has opened and closed 120 outlets across Australia since 2000.
The COVID-19 pandemic changed things dramatically, especially as the business had been based in Victoria for nearly 20 years.
The business shifted to being mainly online, at a time when people were shopping like crazy.
"We are now basically an online business with a couple of legacy stores left, which, as leases expire and things, we are pretty much winding up," he said.
"Our [Majura] lease was up, and the trading has not been great there for the past couple of years."
Today, Book Grocer's online store has 130,000 titles, and a Melbourne warehouse holding around 1 million books.
The business employs around 30 full-time staff at the Melbourne warehouse, and another 30-odd casual workers in the physical bookshops.
And while remainders are strong, it's the second-hand book trade that's doing numbers: Mr Slotte and his team frequently travel to homes and offices holding large book collections, and buy the lot.
The second-hand book trade is big business, and many overseas retailers are largely driven by AI. But Book Grocer is still hands-on. While speaking to The Canberra Times on Monday, Mr Slotte was en route with Jen to a deceased estate in country Victoria, and last week they acquired a 6000-strong collection from a retiring university professor.
And they aren't fussy about their inventory; the range of genres is massive, and Mr Slotte says they sell, for example, mystery boxes of 18 crime fiction novels for $100.
"We tried to tackle both the higher end and the lower end," he said.
"We bought our most impressive book collection a few weeks ago. We operate in a pretty tight offer framework normally, but this one we actually paid good money for - it's got a full Patrick White collection, and it included the very first book of poetry that Patrick White wrote which he hated and burned all the copies of.
"I've got it hidden at the moment in my own bookcase at home, but it will come back into inventory."
At this stage, it's hard to know what to do with the really precious items that come up.
"We've never been very good on the very collectible end - our strength is cheap and cheerful," he said.
"It's one of the problems of the website - how do you display it? We have 130,000 titles, and so how do you bring forward an interesting, unique item amidst all of these others?"
The Finnish migrant was destined to be a bookseller of some kind.
He moved to Canberra in the late 1980s when his parents were posted here as diplomats, and decided to stay, finishing school at Narrabundah College and studying arts and law at the Australian National University.
Even then, he says, he was annoying the campus bookstore by selling law textbooks on the cheap.
He eventually set up his first store on Kennedy Street in Kingston in May, 2000, starting with both second-hand and remainders, but switching to just remainders for a time.
Before that, he had worked for the original owners of Canty's Bookshop in Fyshwick in the early 1990s and fell in love with the second-hand book trade.
Scratch that - his love of books goes right back to his childhood in Helsinki, when he used to trade comic books door-to-door for a commission, and soon graduated to flea markets.
"I was a book scout in the early days, where I would be good at valuing books which are mispriced in stores, and I'd go and buy an item in one place and run to another bookshop and sell it," he said.
"In those days, Helsinki had a very strong second-hand scene. It's unfortunately gone the same way as second-hand bookshops in Australia, where I think the old generation of predominantly old men who ran them have died or retired, and no young people have really stepped into it. You look at Canberra, you've really only got Luke Canty running Canty's, and Book Lore in Lyneham."
It's the massively popular Lifeline Book Fair doing the heavy lifting - Mr Slotte and his team rarely have call to come to the capital.
But he said he was surprised to learn that Canberra's popular book fair had its own strict rules around inventory, and only took some books, leaving donors to dispose of the rest.
"In Melbourne, we have, shall we say, industrial recycling, to put it mildly," he said.
"We take it all, and then we sort them. The 114th copy of 50 Shades of Grey is not necessary in my inventory."
He says the biggest challenge being an online second-hand book seller was monitoring the condition of the books being sent out.
"We get very, very few complaints, but the complaints invariably are condition related, and so we really want to avoid that."
Meanwhile, the business keeps growing, even as physical bookstores are closing down all over the place.
"I always thought law was a good backstop if things don't work out in bookselling," he says of his uni days.
"The thing is, I look back on the last 26 years that I've been actively in bookselling, and just about every single person we've dealt with has gone bankrupt or failed."
Meanwhile, he has a rare Patrick White edition, among others, to deal with that home.
"It is an occupational hazard, because when you start palletising your own personal collection, you know you have a certain problem," he said.
"I excuse myself that I will get around to reading them."
