The rise of online booksellers like Amazon has put pressure on publishers' profit margins, changing the economics of making physical books.

Current bestsellers are secure, but what will happen to yesterday's best-sellers, and the books that will be treasured by a huge number of readers, but which are no longer economically viable?

Now a group of professional writers has decided to hit back, copying the example of farmers who have set up their own stalls to counter price-cutting supermarkets.

The co-operative venture features a blog called Do Authors Dream of Electric Books? as a shop window to their books, which they are publishing themselves for users of e-readers such as the Kindle.

The writers include award-winning children's author Dennis Hamley, who lives in North Oxford.

He said: “Most of us are fed up with commercial publishing. Some have been quietly dropped, all are discontented with the way they are being treated.

“So we are using the Kindle Publishing open access scheme, mainly to reissue out-of-print books, the rights of which we have had reverted to us.

“There are a very great number of books which should never have been put out of print and which we think still have mileage. There's some new work as well.”

He added: “We are pricing our books very competitively, with £1.99 the top price so far — a lot go for 86p. We can do this because we have the 70 per cent return all to ourselves.”

With about 550,000 ebooks available for download, many of them US imports or unedited manuscripts, the thousands of people who have received e-readers for Christmas could be scratching their heads over which books to choose.

The Electric Authors hope to point UK readers towards books which have already been professionally published or edited.

Award-winning children’s writers who have joined the scheme include Lynne Garner and Jan Needle, as well as Linda Newbery, a former teacher at Wheatley Park School whose latest book Lob was nominated for the Carnegie Medal, the UK's main children's book award.

Ms Newbery, who lives near Banbury, said: “I have written too many books for publishers to keep reissuing the old ones, so I chose a book which I thought had not been pushed by the publisher."

Her new books will continue to be published conventionally. She said: “I am not going overboard for Kindle. For me, it was an experiment,” she said. “Some authors are doing really well and have made a lot of money, with high sales.”

One author, Susan Price, had to tear copies of her early books apart and scan them into a computer, because she had originally written them on a typewriter. More recent work, written as Word documents, was simple to convert — once the publisher had agreed to hand back copyright.

Another author, Dan Holloway, of Chipping Norton, said he had sold 200 hard copies of his £9.99 paperback thriller The Company of Fellows. But the digital version sold 7,500 e-books at 86p each. It was voted ‘favourite Oxford novel’ in a poll by bookseller Blackwell’s.

He said: “It is good to be part of a community of people doing similar things. You can swap ideas and they are a friendly group.”

Mr Hamley’s book The War and Freddy was shortlisted for the Smarties prize in 1991, and his stories feature in popular anthologies.

He said: “Everything has changed. Part of me feels like a farmer who has thrown off his ruinous Tesco contract, opened his farm shop to sell direct and now sniffs the heady air of freedom. The other part feels scared stiff.

“But why should I be? I have a long list of books to Kindle. Some are out of print. People have enjoyed them in the past, so surely they can live again?”

He is converting all six of The Joslin de Lay Mysteries, set in the Middle Ages, but hIs biggest project is the Ellen Trilogy. In 2006, Walker published the first, Ellen’s People, set in the first world war. In 2008 they published the second, Divided Loyalties. Then everything went wrong.

“Publisher Candlewick pulled the US version of Divided Loyalties when it was still in production, citing the dreadful state of publishing in the US and their own need to cut titles and reduce staff.

“Over here, sales of Ellen and Loyalties just were not good enough,” he said. “My agent pushed the third book, which I had started and which many readers and reviewers had asked for. No go. Anyway, I did not have a three-book contract. Suddenly, my enthusiasm for a third volume waned.”

The new venture means Mr Hamley can finish the trilogy with an easy mind. “It will take time but will satisfy me very, very deeply.”