Haley said, "More people can find it, want it and know that there is only one of them around."  He said that demand was growing for what he termed "quirkiana" or books on specialist, niche topics that normally would not sell well. The difficult market is the mid-rank with books between 100 pounds and a thousand.

These are books which are rare but not unique, and modern first editions as potential purchasers could scour the web for other examples more easily than in the past. Haley said it was starting to look that second-hand bookshops were doomed.Some in the industry forecast digital books would outsell printed books in Britain in 2015.  Yet the shift to digital publishing only made physical books more alluring to many people.