The Collaborative International Dictionary
Bookselling \Book"sell`ing\, n. The employment of selling books.
Wiktionary
n. The sale of books.
Wikipedia
Bookselling is the commercial trading of books, the retail and distribution end of the publishing process. People who engage in bookselling are called booksellers, bookwomen, or bookmen. The founding of libraries in 300 BC stimulated the energies of the Athenian booksellers. In Rome, toward the end of the republic, it became the fashion to have a library, and Roman booksellers carried on a flourishing trade.
The spread of Christianity naturally created a great demand for copies of the Gospels, other sacred books, and later on for missals and other devotional volumes for both church and private use. The modern system of bookselling dates from soon after the introduction of printing. In the course of the 16th and 17th centuries the Low Countries for a time became the chief centre of the bookselling world. Modern book selling has changed dramatically with the advent of the Internet. With major websites such as Amazon, eBay, and other big book distributors offering affiliate programs, book sales have now, more than ever, been put in the hands of the small business owner.
Usage examples of "bookselling".
In that book he attributes to me a number of shallow and sugary observations upon bookselling that have been an annoyance to the trade.
I keep telling you bookselling is an impossible job for a man who loves literature.
He loved to build up in fancy the flattering details of that fine ceremony when bookselling would at last be properly recognized as one of the learned professions.
Ticknor had started in Boston in the field of complex financing, and he brought to publishing, which at the time was little more than bookselling, the mind of a fine banker.
In that book he attributes to me a number of shallow and sugary observations upon bookselling that have been an annoyance to the trade.
Hall's avowed Tory principles should be disapproved of in the United States, especially as (with a questionable policy in a bookselling point of view, in these reforming times,) he volunteers a profession of political faith, in which, to use the Kentucky phrase, "he goes the whole hog," and bluntly avows, in his concluding chapter, that he not only holds stoutly to Church and State, but that he conceives the English House of Commons to be, if not quite perfect, at least as much so for all the required purposes of representation as it can by possibility be made in practice.