The news is that the number of independent bookshops went up last year, in 2018 by fifteen and in 2017 by one. That’s the good news, though the recovery is not spectacular. The bad news is that in 1995 there were 1,849 of them and in 2016 there were only 867. Is this “bottoming out” or the tanker slowly turning round and is the growth in the indies going to accelerate over the next decade back to previous levels – and beyond?

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