A little more context:
Quote:
Earlier in the talk, he said: “Clearly we will be selling Kindles in the autumn, which are sold by Amazon who is our deadliest foe in all other respects, hence a certain amount of disquiet among publishing colleagues and booksellers, to a much lesser degree, and the general public.” On opting with Amazon and the Kindle, Daunt said it had been a choice between other devices “which have very little traction in this country”, and developing a Waterstones’ own device, which Daunt said the company had had “a highly limited” chance of doing. He said: “Effectively we felt we had very little choice but to do this.”
“Amazon is the dominant force, it has cut a swathe and transformed our industry . . . It has a basic monopoly on digital reading and this will increase it and indeed perpetuate it and all of us have our doubts about it. In meeting our customers' needs, we felt we had very little choice but to do it.”
“Our view is that people are choosing to read digitally, our job is to sell reading and if they want to do so digitally we need to provide that to them and above all else keep bookshops relevant.”
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His statements doesn't really seem to answer the question: what is Waterstones doing other than making itself a showroom for Amazon? Doesn't that cannibalize their business long term?