Ten years of e‐books: a review

In the beginning: 2000 At the beginning of December 2000 I was in charge of Business Development at Waterstone’s, and, in partnership with HarperCollins, about to launch the first discrete e-book to be commercially available in the UK. Ironically, given both my own background in academic bookselling and the fact that almost all the e-books that were to be published in the next five years belonged to the academic sector, it was a trade fiction title. The book had been published in print first, at about twice the price we were proposing to charge for the electronic version. The story consisted of a slightly geeky male-orientated exchange of emails – it was a sort of masculine online version of Bridget Jones’s Diary. Entitled The e before Christmas, it had been chosen by Graham Bell of HarperCollins and myself to appeal to the sort of person that we thought might be an early e-book adopter: male, aged 25–35, upwardly mobile, interested in technology but sophisticated enough to laugh at it.1 At the time, this was also the profile of the core Waterstone’s high street ‘heavy book-buying’ customer. After much negotiation with the company that had digitized it and added the proprietary e-reader technology without which it could not be accessed – called Glassbook, they have long since dropped out of existence – it was posted for sale on the HarperCollins ‘Fire and Water’ website (now also defunct). If you wanted to buy it from Waterstone’s, you achieved this by means of a click-through to ‘Fire and Water’ from the Waterstone’s website. The whole enterprise cost several weeks’ work, and generated sales of fewer than 100 copies. Graham and I were actually quite pleased with this result, because the project had not been designed to create income: rather, it 222 Linda Bennett