Bookshops are best route to market

Bookshops in the UK and Ireland must “invest” to become “the best in the world,” the Bookseller Association president Tim Walker told delegates at the Bookseller Association Conference in Warwick in September.

Walker made the rallying cry for bookshops to arm-up in the face of digital and online bookselling, telling the delegation that bookshops were still publishers’ and authors’
“very best route to market”.

Booksellers will succeed by engaging better with customers and reminding them that “bookshops are still the very best places to discover books,” Walker said. “In this modern bookselling era of p-books and e-books, the world has not ended for bookshops as many predicted. Yes it is tough, but print book sales through bookshops are still strong and whilst it is easy to become distracted by the allure of digital media, we must maintain publishers’ and authors’ focus on the fact that booksellers and bookshops are still their very best route to market.”