Canelo / Arts Council England

3. Ebooks and Digital Technology 

The Christmases of 2010 and 2011 changed British writing and 

publishing forever. Prior to this, there had been much hype and 

discussion of ebooks dating back to the late 1990s. In truth, it had never 

taken off, although a Sony and Waterstones partnership in 2008 was a 

valiant effort. Instead it was when Amazon put serious muscle behind 

its UK Kindle, and those devices became the Christmas present of 

choice, that ebooks really started to move. Their impact on the structure 

of the UK market was far reaching. 

Amazon, of course, had been a presence in the British book trade for 

many years prior to the launch of the Kindle. Their market share had 

been growing steadily, but the Kindle gave it rocket boosters. Although 

there were many other entrants to the ebook market at the same time 

as Amazon, notably Apple iBooks, Kobo, Barnes and Noble’s Nook, 

Sony and Google Books, all the available data shows that Kindle was by 

some distance the biggest single retailer of ebooks with between 75% 

and 90% of the market. Many had expressed scepticism that ebooks 

would take off, but in the years after 2010 ebooks came to be a larger 

and larger proportion of the market. When we look at print sales figures 

in the period 2010–2016 therefore, part of the reason numbers have 

remained so depressed appears to be because readers have migrated to 

ebooks. This helps to explain both the ongoing depression despite the 

general economic recovery, and how publishers have maintained and 

even increased profitability over those years. 

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