My great grandmother had a good idea. An enterprising woman by all accounts, she realised that the rich people in our part of north London all had cats to keep rats and mice down in their big houses. So she opened a cats’ meat shop. It thrived for years and kept the family’s heads above water. The advent of mass-produced canned cat food, and the increasing availability of rodent poisons, eventually did for the business.

You don’t see cats’ meat shops anymore. Or eel and pie shops. Or real sweet shops. (I don’t mean the fancy chocolate stores with their expensive hand-made, own brand confectionery; I’m thinking of places stacked high with big glass jars of sweeties I dimly remember from my early childhood.) There are no milk bars around, and few tea rooms. Knitting wool shops are getting rarer; and how long will photo developing shops hold out in the face of digital cameras?

I’m wondering if bookshops are going to join the list of extinct retail outlets.

That would have seemed like an absurd idea just five years ago. But now we’re in a world where online booksellers, and supermarkets, have taken a huge chunk of the market. In the UK, independent bookshops are closing at the rate of three a week, and the picture’s not much brighter across the rest of Europe and in the US. Specialist science fiction outlets, in particular, have taken a real hammering in recent times.

On the high street, a handful of big chains dominate, and will probably weather change longer than the independents. But given the steep overheads of bricks and mortar retailing, the chains increasingly focus on stocking titles they think will sell. Esoteric and minority interest books, and debut authors, find it harder and harder to gain shelf space. Whereas internet booksellers, like amazon and play.com, can in theory offer everything in print. They do it at competitive prices, too, and they’ve got their service levels up to an excellent standard.

I love bookshops. I worked as a bookseller before I went into full-time authorship, and would hate to see them go. There’s no substitute for the synergy of a well-stocked bookstore, or the recommendations of clued-up staff. The chains can’t offer everything, supermarkets are only interested in creaming off the bestsellers, and internet sites, excellent as some are, make it difficult to browse in that associational way a shop makes possible. And you can’t smell that wonderful aroma of old books on a website.

Maybe it’s luddite to rage against the possible passing of what’s looking more and more like an archaic way of selling books. As authors, we should be grateful for any platform that shifts books, which the internet sites and supermarkets do supremely well. And as readers we should perhaps be grateful that price-cutting has made books more affordable.

It could be that one way out of the present dilemma facing bookshops would be for the publishers to stop giving in to the demands of the chains and supermarkets for ever bigger discounts. It’s absurd, for instance, that no retailer made a profit on the last two Harry Potter books because they were so heavily cut in price. There’s an argument for saying that sure-fire titles shouldn’t be discounted at all, and that the lower prices should be reserved for new authors who need the boost. There’s an equally strong argument for the publishers banding together and selling their books direct to the public, either through their own shops or on the net, offering such discounts as they think appropriate and curtailing some of the power of the big boys. If she were around today, it’s probably what my great grandmother would have done.

Stan Nicholls