"People often find bookshops quite intimidating, and in the past they were. I don't think they're so intimidating now. The environment has changed a lot: the shops are brighter and more colourful, the layout is better and you don't feel you have to go in and whisper quietly like a library."

Ms Gemma Barry, as president of the Booksellers' Association of the United Kingdom and Ireland, oversees a trade organisation that shows booksellers how to run their businesses more efficiently. Keeping up to date is crucial to shaking off the dusty atmosphere of stereotypical old-style bookshops, with splintering shelves and staff resembling Dylan Moran's grouchy, customer-hating bookshop manager in the Channel 4 sitcom Black Books.

"Bookshops are a lot less learned than they used to be and they're a lot more commercial," adds Ms Barry. Presentation is important: people judge a bookshop by its shop-front as much as they inevitably judge a book by its cover. But quality and range of stock is crucial.

The success of her own family business, Dubray Books, she says, is partly due to staff who know how to pick and choose. "You can't actually train people to be readers, and it's readers who will have the best effect on the quality of the stock."

Despite repeated assertions that our leisure time is increasingly dominated by the audiovisual sector, readers are still thick on the ground. "It is a mature market, but there is still steady growth," says Ms Barry.

"There's huge growth in the children's area at the moment, which we all refer to as the Harry Potter effect. Those books actually had a wonderful knock-on effect, with children looking for similar books to read. Everybody got excited by Harry Potter, and it probably brought more people into the reading arena who weren't there before."

The success of Harry Potter reflects how the publishing side of the book industry has become more intensely marketing driven. Bestsellers, boosted by media PR, are selling in larger quantities, but everything else is selling in much lower quantities than before, trickling away in twos and threes.

"That is quite a big change and possibly not a change for the better," says Ms Barry. "One would have a slight worry that publishers would become very focused on what they call the `frontlist' and the newer authors would not have money put behind them to develop them." For retailers, it was the end of the net book agreement in 1995 that signalled the beginning of more aggressive competitive strategies. A gentleman's agreement in Ireland but law in the UK, it was the last price-fixing measure in British commerce. Its breakdown left some independent booksellers in Britain unable to match steep chain discounts on vital Christmas bestsellers.

"People thought the entire independent trade was going to collapse, but nothing happened," says Ms Barry. "Well, no . . . In Ireland, the situation didn't really change that much," she qualifies. "There was a little more discounting, so a little more marketing came into the trade. We might even have benefited from it. But some of the smaller shops in the UK would certainly have suffered. The larger chains there would be selling the new Delia Smith at half-price, so it would be cheaper for the independents to buy it from the person selling it at half-price than it would be to get it from the supplier."

For this reason, independent booksellers in Britain are in slow decline, losing almost 10 per cent of the total book sales market last year. This loss, the Booksellers Association says, is due to the closure of more than one in 10 small independent bookshops in Britain since the end of the net book agreement. Having penetrated the cities, the chains are now moving into market towns, threatening side street independents and "hobbyist" booksellers.

"The places where the chains haven't gone, you will find thriving independents, people who are good at what they do," says Ms Barry. "But it has certainly become far more of a business, in the real sense of hard business, than it used to be."

Competition from the internet has been over-hyped though, with Amazon's share of the market settling between 5-6 per cent. "Certainly as a branding issue, Amazon has been a huge success," says Ms Barry. "But nobody is actually making any money, they're all only losing a fortune." The Booksellers Association has set up an internet sub-group, discussing issues of interest to both online and traditional booksellers, such as the possibility of putting VAT on e-books. "It is in neither of their interests to have that," she adds. But the internet is "just a different channel of distribution", unlikely to seriously upset general consumer trade. "There is still a lot of impulse-buying, people who come in for a browse. We're nearly more part of the leisure market," she concludes.

Ms Barry's own independent Dubray chain in Ireland remains profitable. It started life as the Bray Bookshop in 1972, owned by Ms Barry's mother, Ms Helen Clear. In 1988, Ms Barry and her husband Kevin bought Ms Clear out, moving the shop from a side street to Main Street, Bray. The move was the start of a gradual expansion. In 1990, they opened the Dublin Bookshop on Grafton Street, its prime retail site guaranteeing success from the start.

"Dubray" was coined from Dublin and Bray and became the supplier-friendly group name when outlets opened in Rathmines and Kilkenny in 1994, although the Dublin Bookshop on Grafton Street kept its original name. In 1996, the Dubray chain extended to Stillorgan, and in 1998 to Galway. An average of six full-time staff are employed at each branch and the chain's owners are pleased with its 10 per cent share of the Irish market. They also own four upmarket card and gift shops, trading under the name of SWALK.

During this same period of expansion, Ms Barry moved up the ranks of the Booksellers Association of the UK and Ireland, from training officer and chairwoman of its Irish branch to member of the UK Council. After an "absolutely monumental apprenticeship", including stints as treasurer and vice-president, she became president.

Ms Barry now travels to Britain frequently for association board meetings. The organisation promotes reading initiatives such as World Book Day and administers the Whitbread Awards and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. It owns two commercial companies, Book Tokens Ltd and BATCH, an online invoicing and payments system at the pilot stage of development. The association also negotiates trade-wide credit-card discounts and insurance schemes and monitors legislation that will affect the industry.

One ongoing concern is "the great pricing debate": whether or not to remove printed recommended retail prices from the back of books. "Transparency" and, for British bookshops, the considerable labour-saving benefit of not having to price their stock, are the main arguments for keeping the printed price. Removing it, on the other hand, would give the bookseller, rather than the supplier, freedom to control their profit margin.

The association's work is sometimes taken for granted, Ms Barry notes, but at the beginning of her two-year term as president, she is convinced its support is crucial to the industry. "When you're on the crest of a wave, people say you don't need a trade association. But the first time there are any difficulties, it's the first place booksellers turn to for help."