Bookstore owner Emma Trotman is well used to people telling her she must be crazy.
After becoming obsessed with pictures of books on social media and starting an online bookshop, she quit her steady job to start her own bricks-and-mortar store in the small Victorian town of Meeniyan, population 840.
Trotman fitted out a former gelato shop with second hand shelves, opening Nice Stack of Books in December 2022 - right in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis.
Against the odds, the Gippsland town has turned out to be a fabulous location.
Melburnians visit on their way to the beach, locals drop in for a chat and customers have even begun to visit from nearby towns.
Nice Stack of Books is helping people remember that bookshops are special, said Trotman, and quite unlike online retail.
"It's just a completely different experience, you can flick through the books and chat about what everybody's liking at the moment," she told AAP.
Nice Stack of Books is one of about 100 bookstores across Australia celebrating Love Your Bookshop Day on Saturday, and Trotman will be giving away tote bags and mystery books with each purchase.
The event has been going for more than a decade, inspired by Record Store Day which began in the US in 2007.
Robbie Egan, from peak body BookPeople, is an industry veteran: he's seen Angus and Robertson close its shops and move online, the rise and fall of Borders and the decline of campus bookstores.
Egan believes that despite the variety of online shopping, physical bookshops are actually where people discover new titles for themselves.
"They're also spaces where people feel non-transactional, they actually go in seeking a kind of conversation, rather than just monetary exchange," he said.
About 71 million books were sold in Australia in 2022, according to Nielsen BookScan Australia, with the market on track to record similar sales in 2023.
It's a jump of approximately 18 per cent, in terms of both sales volume and value, when compared to the pre-pandemic first half of 2019.
The growth has been driven by adult fiction, especially romance novels, graphic novels and, to a lesser extent, children's books and young adult fiction.
Despite these figures, recent research shows the number of Australians who read for pleasure has fallen.
The National Arts Participation Survey asked some 10,000 people about their reading habits and found the proportion of Australians aged 65 and over who read for pleasure has dropped significantly.
It's down from 77 per cent to 68 per cent, while the percentage of people in this age bracket who do not read print books at all has jumped from one-quarter in 2019, to 35 per cent in 2022.
Egan puts these numbers down to a decline in reading following a huge increase during the pandemic.
"It worries me but I don't think it's the end of the world, I think it might be a lag from COVID times," he said.
Reading physical books has held up in the face of numerous threats, such as tablets, smart phones and streaming television, he said.
"Our relationship with our local bookshop and the people that work there is extremely special and one-of-a-kind and so it deserves to be celebrated," Egan said.
