Waterstones (UK) may break even

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by MikeB1972

Waterstones sell kindles and, rather bizarrely, epubs.

It used to be that they sold epub readers. I still think they are shooting themselves in the foot in the long term, the loss of business to amazon will surely cost more than the referral fees they gain.

When Walmart stopped carrying Kindles about two years ago (at least that is when my Walmart did) I thought right away that it was a stupid decision on their part. They still had Nooks for a while, now they don't have any eink readers.

If you sell ereaders, sell what people want, not what you think they should have in order to help your bottom line. I believe in the UK by far the most ebooks get bought from Amazon, even more than in the US.

When I suggested B&N start selling Kindles I was only half joking. It is extremely hard to sell both pbooks and ebooks in the same B&M store. Or rather B&N shows how easy it is to screw up. Waterstones might be smarter in not even pretending to be able to be better than Amazon when it comes to ebooks. But they serve more readers that way - the ones reading both ebooks and pbooks. If I already had a Kindle and would want to visit a real bookstore, then a bookstore that stocks my kind of ereader might also do something right with pbooks.