"Bookselling is an interesting landscape. In the liminal space between retail and the creative industries, it occupies an emotional, political, cultural, social and transactional area in the minds of its customers, the media and the industry itself....
"The book industry has always been an unlikely amalgam of the very large and the unfeasibly tiny, the stellar famous and the unknown--each part of the business circling, supporting and reinforcing the others. We need, in the noisy environment we all inhabit, to take a moment, take a breath, take a beat, to understand the value of what we have, and to invest in it; to build it, and to support those booksellers taking books to readers."
--Meryl Halls, managing director of the Booksellers Association of the U.K. & Ireland, in a commentary for the Bookseller