Increasing pressure from big box retail venues and supermarkets to deeply discount books is a good part of the reason the UK has lost Marion Boyers. And you can be pretty sure this story is playing out around the world. Anecdotes? Solutions? Assuaging words of perspective?

The company, which started out in the 1960s as Calder and Boyars and has been run by Marion Boyars’ daughter Kilgarriff since 1999, gave the news in a letter to trade customers.

Kilgarriff told The Bookseller: “It was the discounts that got me, and the fact I was not able to publish without the confidence that we would get into one of those [special deal] offers. And even if we did, you have to kick back something to get there, so in the end we were lucky even just covering costs.

“Without Borders [being so active], the whole retail end is uneven. You have one company dominating the high street, one online, so it’s impossible for independent publishers to budget with any kind of confidence”.

She added the costs of marketing a book that was shortlisted for an award were prohibitive “which meant I was no longer wanting to take on literary fiction, because I couldn’t afford to enter prizes”.