The Book Trade: Past, Present and the Future

Retail is an ever-changing environment, and the UK book trade has certainly experienced plenty of change. This industry of ours has reinvented itself multiple times over the centuries, yet arguably the last four decades have witnessed more change than ever before.

Having run an independent bookshop [Robbs Bookshop in Chelmsford] through those last decades, I have first-hand experience of these shifting tides, and wanted to understand them better. It is not only important to document them, but to put them into historical context - and then try to assess where the trade goes from here. Shelf Life is not just a history of the British book trade, much as it tries to give a whistlestop tour through the past two thousand years. It is also a call to action on many issues, including the impact of AI, how we can get more people (especially children) reading, and how we can help secure the future for print books and bricks-and-mortar bookshops.