It started as a festival to celebrate a unique town in Wales that seemed to consist entirely of secondhand bookstores. Now, the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival has grown into a wildly successful, internationally acclaimed annual event … and the booksellers of Hay say it’s killing them. As Andrew Johnson reports in a story for The Independent, the booksellers say the festival “has become a corporate monster with sponsorship by Sky and The Guardian. They argue it sucks up the thousands of tourists who used to browse in the town’s second-hand book emporia but now no longer visit except to park their cars.” One local bookseller, Paul Harris, says trade is off by as much as 50 percent recently, because it’s become harder and harder to publicize the town over the festival. But festival founder Peter Florence skips the year-round promotion question and replies that if Hay booksellers can’t figure out how to make money off the festival’s 65,000 visitors, they “need to rethink their strategy.”