The joy of stumbling on a captivating book of which you were previously unaware is being undermined by the internet, one of the world’s most highly regarded authors believes.

Margaret Atwood, the Canadian author whose books include The Edible Woman, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Blind Assassin, which won the Booker Prize in 2000, said that the “serendipity” of discovering something in a bookshop has not been replicated online.

Kazuo Ishiguro, another Booker Prize winner, agrees. He told The Times yesterday that shopping for books on the internet was helpful for his work “but it’s not fun”.

Atwood told the London Book Fair last week: “You are not going to get the same experience on the net. Amazon is trying, by saying, ‘If you like this book you might like this other book’, but it’s often something quite offensive that they suggest.”

She added that the success of internet retailers meant that bookshops were missing out on “the sales that they wouldn’t expect to make, but make because somebody sees this beautiful cover and they pick it up and read the front flap.

“They might look at the back flap and the picture of the author, then they might read the first two or three pages. If they are me, they might then open it in the middle. It all takes about five minutes.”

Fewer customers were taking those vital five minutes as online and supermarket book sales increase. Between 2001 and 2005, the market share of independent bookshops fell by 16 per cent, Book Marketing, the consumer research company, said. Over the same period, the supermarkets’ share grew by 90 per cent and internet sales by 183 per cent.

Last month Waterstones announced plans to close 30 of its shops. Borders, the US behemoth, has put its entire British operation up for sale.

But there are positive signs. The book market is growing and the number of independent bookshops appears to have stabilised and in some cases is thriving by offering an alternative to the dominance of heavily promoted bestsellers. Ishiguro often drops into his local bookshop in Hampstead, North London, to while away a few hours in idle browsing, but he warned against sentimentalising the independent bookshops of days gone by.

“I’m not really nostalgic for them,” he said. “Those tiny independent bookshops with some dragon behind the desk on the phone to her daughter, or the politically committed bookshops with tons of stuff about Chairman Mao.”

The internet is a far better medium for finding the books he needs to research his novels.

“You can find very obscure books, and read reviews of them but it doesn’t compare to the fun value of coming into a bookshop.”

Amazon’s recommendations were often amusingly useless, he added. “One of the last books I bought was a study guide to one of my old books, The Remains of the Day. Now they keep recommending my own books to me.”

Stephen Page, chief executive of Faber and Faber and president of the Publishers’ Association, said that the capricious impulses that lead book-buyers to make unexpected purchases were important because they guarded against the “corrosive” impact on society of everybody reading the same thing.

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