But bricks-and-mortar booksellers can sell via the internet too, and booksellers can migrate to lower rent areas. Indeed, there is some evidence of this: there are fewer city centre bookshops and more in smaller, less expensive towns.

There was a hip university neighborhood used bookstore here, and even 20+ years ago they were also selling online.

Their online inventory included a large amount of stock in a warehouse nearby that wasn't accessible to brick&mortar shoppers.

Software automated the online listings and price adjusting.

[...] contemporary book trade and book-collecting directories [...] there were 523 second-hand bookshops in the UK in 1955 [...] and 1,140 in 2014. There are 1,282 now, in April 2025.

Anyone know whether these all have a walk-in retail presence, appointment-only (like for rare books), or are a lot of those online-only sellers?