Text by Matteo Pini

There is a moment in the 1998 romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail, in which Kathleen Kelly, the owner of independent children’s bookshop The Shop Around the Corner, unleashes her fury on Joe Fox, the corporate owner of megachain Fox Books. “You, with your theme park, multi-level, H&M-the-world Mochaccinoland!” she rages. “You’ve deluded yourself that you’re a benefactor bringing books to the masses. But no one will ever remember you, Joe Fox… You are nothing but a suit!” The exchange forms the film’s climax, the moment at which the plucky independent finally confronts the corporate suit and reminds him of the value of real literature. We might expect this scene to be the moment at which Joe realises that his slick, soulless stores can never replace the homespun charm of Kathleen’s family-run business. And yet, that’s not what happens. By the end of the film, Kathleen has not only been put out of business by Joe, but she has also fallen in love with him. Joe wins both Kathleen’s heart and her very attractive retail space. 

This somewhat perverse dynamic, the interplay between swoony rom-com tropes and the vicious machinations of late-capitalist Big Publishing, makes You’ve Got Mail a confounding watch. At once intensely dated and strangely prophetic as to the future state of American bookselling, it is a film so devoted to celebrating the romance of small bookstores that it can be easy to forget it is also a tragedy about their imminent death. Cast against type, Tom Hanks stars as Joe Fox, a charming asshole whose bookshop empire, Fox Books, is so transparently based on Barnes & Noble it is barely subtext. In pursuit of total market dominance, he attempts to put The Shop Around the Corner out of business. Meg Ryan’s Kathleen is a holdout for hand-tipped book illustrations and cash-over-card who has inherited the store from her late mother, and despises Joe’s smug insouciance and casual cruelty. Yet unbeknownst to either of them, the two booksellers have been conducting an anonymous email dialogue that threatens to warm into a romance. Cue a war of words and wits in a dreamworld of the New York upper-middle class, contrasted with a similarly pointed and sexually tense online flirtation.

The year You’ve Got Mail was released, a similar scenario was unfolding in real life. The American Booksellers’ Association, America’s largest and oldest non-profit organisation for independent booksellers, had filed a lawsuit against Barnes & Noble and Borders Books, which at the time were responsible for a quarter of all national book sales. The suit alleged that the two companies were strong-arming publishers into providing discounts to which independent bookshops were not privy. At a 1998 ABA meeting in Berkeley, California, outraged bookshop owners decried Barnes & Noble’s then-novel, now-commonplace practice of “search engine hijacking”, redirecting online customers away from independent e-shops towards chain store websites. From coast to coast, it was the same story: chain bookstores were monopolising the market, fighting turf wars with independent bookstores and winning. The stakes, the ABA argued, went well beyond the balance sheets: without the risk-taking philosophy of the independents, a dynamic literary culture would wither and die. Still, there was some hope on the horizon that one day, these corporate Goliaths might be defeated. “These aren’t exactly the glory days of bookselling,” said ABA president Richard Howorth in an interview the following year, “but I feel we are turning a corner.”

It was, in retrospect, the kind of optimism particular to people who don’t yet realise they’ve already lost. In 1998, the publishing industry was turning a corner: German company Bertelsmann acquired Random House, making Bertelsmann-Random House, the largest English-language book publisher in the world. Two years earlier, Penguin had acquired G.P. Putnam’s Sons, massively increasing their leverage in the American market. In the retail sector, it was the same story: independent bookstores were seeing their share of the US market dwindle year upon year, from 31% in 1991 to a paltry 4.3% three decades later. Howorth’s hopeful augury would sound downright careless three years later when the ABA was forced to settle its case against the megastores. Though they received a $4.7 million payout, it was a pittance compared to the $20 million they had spent on the case. Judge William Orrick was not sympathetic to the ABA’s claim that big businesses gaming the industry was against the law. “Isn’t that what capitalism is all about?” he is reported to have said.

Ultimately, the ABA’s battle was emotional as well as financial, attempting to defend a way of life as much as market share. Their principled, underfunded stance was no match for the steamrolling force of the conglomeration era, wherein one has no choice but to love one’s overlord. It’s this uncanny echo between fiction and reality that gives You’ve Got Mail its anthropological value. In the film, the audience is denied the storybook ending we might expect from a film of this genre: Joe puts The Shop Around the Corner out of business, but the couple fall in love anyhow. In the proud tradition of corporate mythmaking, the film proposes that it is possible to shutter a small business with verve and charm. The film’s denouement does not come as much of a surprise: even if Kathleen stands as a metaphorical shield against the onwardness and endlessness of corporate expansion, the film understands that her shop is, in its own way, a kind of privilege, a business that trades on nostalgia, selling books that are more expensive but not altogether different from those on offer at Fox Books. Her anti-corporate stance is aesthetic, not structural, and, as if to wink at whose side she is on, Kathleen is also a Starbucks addict, right at the point when the company’s monopolistic tactics were gobbling up independent shopfronts like hers. The film’s most self-consciously literary characters are, not incidentally, the least likeable: Joe’s publisher girlfriend is a caricature of an abrasive career gal, and Kathleen’s boyfriend is a typewriter-using blowhard, who uses phrases like “Jeffersonian purity” to describe her shop. When Joe reveals that he has been the mystery man on the other side of the keyboard, Kathleen’s response – “I wanted it to be you!” – is a quiet surrender to corporate inevitability.

Perhaps what’s most dated is the film’s conviction that brick-and-mortar stores are the apex predator in the fight against independents. Amazon, a minor competitor in 1998, would over the ensuing decade dwarf Barnes & Noble. With aggressive pricing strategies and an ability to operate with razor-thin margins, in 2009, Amazon registered $20 billion in net revenue, more than Barnes & Noble had ever made in a fiscal year. Meanwhile, conglomerate monopolies were growing ever larger: the “Big Six” publishing houses shrank to five after 2013’s Penguin-Random House merger. If anything, in the battle between massive corporations and independent businesses, Barnes & Noble now has more in common with the indies the company once sought to destroy. As if to underline how much the tides had turned, in 2018, Oren Teicher and Leonard Riggio, CEOs of Barnes & Noble and the ABA, respectively, publicly praised each other in a joint court briefing against giants like Amazon.

The shift from publishing as an avenue for virtue to just another product in the late-capitalist churn is evident in other latter-day publishing rom-coms. The Proposal (2009), released just months after the global financial crisis, is the genre’s end point: its characters are not the wholesome proto-bloggers strolling lazily through New York streets, caught in a flour cloud from the local bagel shop, but overworked strivers who read proofs from exercise bikes, inhabit soulless, WeWork-style office spaces, and have Pulitzer Prizes dangled in front of them like carrots.

Margaret Tate, played by Sandra Bullock, is a high-powered literary editor who, through contrivances screeching even for the genre, must wed her put-upon assistant Andrew Paxton, played by Ryan Reynolds, to prevent getting deported. Cold, ruthless, and only occasionally glitched with emotion, Margaret is hated by Andrew, the starry-eyed romantic holding onto the nobility of old books. Yet his aspirations are dismissed not just by his disapproving father – “Why don’t you tell us exactly what a book editor does, besides taking writers out to lunch and getting bombed?” – but by Margaret herself. “I live at Central Park West,” she snips at Andrew during one of their frequent spats. “And you probably live at some squalid little studio apartment with stacks of yellowed Penguin Classics.” Publishing has become another corporate gig in which the goal, above all else, is dominance over one’s subordinates.

The Proposal is a substantially worse film than You’ve Got Mail – it is difficult to hinge a film around the unlikeability of a character played by Sandra Bullock – but it is perhaps a more honest depiction of the 21st-century publishing landscape. Dispensing with Kathleen Kelly’s notion that books are somehow “purer” than the market they exist within, The Proposal understands that the bookish life Kathleen clings to is not simply under threat; it has been totally replaced. The romance that unfolds between Margaret and Andrew occurs not through extended monologues over email, but through HR violations and curt text messages. The eventual love that blossoms does not fundamentally alter Margaret’s chilly, power-hungry disposition. Instead, it is just another kind of merger: by the end of the film, Andrew has the pleasure of joining her in the boardroom, from where one day he might get his long-gestating manuscript published.

If You’ve Got Mail might be compared in spirit to an early blog post, The Proposal evokes a work email: terse, unfeeling, vaguely apologetic, easily forgotten. It accepts the total transformation of the industry with a weary shrug and a Starbucks coffee held in a jittery hand. In both films, as in real life, almost everyone loses: the independent bookstore is subsumed by the corporate superstore, which in turn is subsumed by the endless, invisible sprawl of the internet. Perhaps the decline of publishing as a go-to profession for rom-com heroines is that the preternaturally optimistic outlook of the genre jars with the grim reality of market forces. “If you can’t beat them, join them” doesn’t make for a particularly romantic conclusion.

Today the quirky, put-upon, thirty-something rom-com heroine has pivoted to content creation. The leads of the Hallmark rom-coms now run the gamut of aspirational millennial professions, from food influencers to interior design influencers to celebrity ghost hunters. In the 2021 Netflix teen comedy Love at First Stream, romance blossoms between two TikTok creators competing over engagement metrics. And in the ghoulish Sex and the City follow-up And Just Like That…, Carrie Bradshaw, the doyenne of the late 1990s literary fetishisation, has, naturally, made the leap from sex columnist to podcast host. What the indie bookstore was to the 1990s, the podcast is to the 2020s: a synecdoche for emotional resonance and human touch in a commodified world.

Still, if the publishing rom-com is dead, then the spirit that underpinned it is very much alive. We still crave romance that feels mediated, personal, unrushed. In 1998, You’ve Got Mail posed the question of whether the “small life” is worth living, and answered with a bashful “it’s complicated”. In 2025, the notion of living a “small life” is downright subversive.  If an independent literary culture can be cheerfully crushed under the boot of global capitalism, the spirit that underpins it – carving out a space, however small, for softness, locality, twee – is harder to break. .