There's an interesting collection of comments over at the Guardian's Comment is Free website following a piece I penned earlier this week on whether subsidies should be employed in order to help high street booksellers survive on the high street. My view was that government hand-outs won't hold back the twin forces of digital reading and aggressive discounting, but there was still plenty indies could do to sustain their businesses.

One commentator makes a particularly relevant point: "What might be helpful is the Booksellers Association brokering an eBook platform open to all independent shops. Most of us don't have the technical staff to do this ourselves, and the publishers need a centralised push to get them to work with us (and make it economically worthwhile)."

I think it is a suggestion worth pursuing and it is perhaps an area where government funding could be employed since the present administration has been actively promoting a "Blueprint for Technology" through various investment funds. Of course Gardners and Google might argue that platforms already exist that enable indies to sell e-books, and the Hive this morning revealed impressive digital sales growth.

In the US the American Booksellers Association runs IndieCommerce, which helps indies sell books on the web, and also sells e-books via Google. The UK Booksellers Association has already brought over elements of the ABA's IndieBound scheme, with some success. IndieCommerce is a whole different ball-game, but as its recent announcement about not stocking Amazon-published titles shows, the combination of large numbers of indies remains a powerful force.

With HarperCollins UK today revealing that digital sales now account for 20% of its trade business, how independent bookshops gain a foothold in the digital world should be high on everyone's agenda. We may not like subsidies over here, but we will like even less a world dominated only by Amazon.