I HATE shopping, but trips to the High Street or the local shopping mall will be even more tedious if we lose our big book stores.

Borders has gone into administration, and the received wisdom is that it’s due to the competition provided by online booksellers (Amazon, mainly) and by discounted books available in superstores such as Tesco.

And I have to accept my share of the responsibility. I’ve bought a lot of books through Amazon over the years – books I would otherwise have bought from Borders or Waterstone’s. I can spend hours (or did before I had kids) browsing bookshelves in either of those chains, and the prospect of not being able to do so in the future doesn’t bear thinking about.

Sellers of books and DVDs are, I suspect, more vulnerable to online competition than are clothes retailers; people still want to see and hold a shirt or a pair of trousers in their hands before buying. But a book’s a book, whether you pick it off a shelf yourself or it arrives in the post.

So are we seeing the demise of the High Street bookseller, and if so, does it matter?