"I visited half-a-dozen [bookshops] on a book tour last week. Books have never been more beautiful and small shops never more creative in selling these lovely objects.... When I last toured indie bookshops two years ago, there was ebullience at the peaking of Kindle sales and popular revulsion at Amazon's tax arrangements. But no conventional economist could grasp how 900 indies are still in business. They are, because so much bookselling is done out of love. That's wonderful, but the rest of us--and publishers producing special editions--must love them back."
--Patrick Barkham, author most recently of Islander: A Journey Around Our Archipelago, in a column for the Guardian