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Originally Posted by Top100EbooksRank
I'm sure Waterstones will make a lot of money out of this. You don't shoot your own foot for no financial gains.
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That's exactly what Waterstones has done.
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Originally Posted by Top100EbooksRank
You don't invite your BIGGEST competitor to set up shop in your own store unless it makes financial sense for you.
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For many years, Borders (US) did not set up their own website; they basically put a skin on Amazon's website. As a result, they were basically handing one of their biggest competitors a check and tons of user data every minute of every day. Along similar lines, they partnered with Kobo on ebooks.
Borders shut down last year. This wasn't the only reason why, but it certainly was a part of it.
In the
short term, this is probably the best Waterstones can do. It would cost hundreds of millions of pounds to develop their own ebook reader, and it might never recoup the expenses. They could develop a tablet app, but would be hamstrung on the iOS platform.
In the long term, they've turned themselves into a showroom for Amazon, which is basically an inventive way of digging their own grave.