A famous line from Jurassic Park (1993) is that ‘[y]our scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should’. I felt much the same, today, reading J. M. Hawker’s Capital Letters: The Economics of Academic Bookselling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) <https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675376>. For the aptly named Hawker tells us, the ‘core purpose of both